Showering & The Smell Of Death

So what happens? You start to look at other avenues, other ways to cleanse and refresh. You start trawling the forums on social media to see what they’re up to and there it is! The portable battery operated shower! Instagram shows scantily clad humans frolicking under fresh clean water, playfully squirting each other with the diamond encrusted liquid, washing the days sand from their glistening bodies. You forget you’re a slightly overweight, pot bellied McDonald’s loving out of shape frump and hit the Amazon buy button for next day delivery to the nearest hub. The night passes by slowly as you keep checking the order to see if it has been dispatched. Finally, 143 years later, your phone dings. The race is on to the hub to collect your new lease of life!

A couple of hours later, you’re sitting there in your van, still hot, still sweaty, still smelly. The realisation has hit that where the hell are you going to use this contraption? You look out the window into the carpark you’re currently holed up in and you’re 100% certain that an arrest will be made should you attempt to shower there. “When was the last time you were actually at a beach mate?” you ask yourself. “Ah fuck. This ain’t gonna work either.” Sulking, the shower head on a hose with a battery goes back in the box and chucked into the box marked “random shit you’re never gonna use” and so the conundrum continues.

After many more awkward questions on the forums you head off to seek out a motorway service area as you’ve learned that those unmarked doors on the bogs are actually showers! Now you’re almost skipping into the loos, towel and clean pants in hand to be met with that stench of stale urine and rotting corpses. Holding back the gags and heaves, you seek out the infamous shower cubicle. There’s a line of dirty men in flip flops, all looking at the floor, all holding towels. “Bollocks.” After an hour of shuffling forward, by now quite blind to the putrid smell of death, it’s your turn. The fella leaves and says “good luck”. Typically, as with any queue I join, I was at the back and remained at the back, the last person.

Gingerly, you open the door and there it is. The Devils arse crack. A sea of curly pubic hair floating on a foamy floor of 11 men’s 12 hour shift wash off. But you stink, you’ve been waiting for this! You spend a few minutes wondering where to put your stuff without picking up a disease or two, and hastily conjure up a plan that inevitably fails causing you to drop your clean gentleman’s sausage sheet and foot jackets into the puddle of dead skin and foot scum. Fighting back the tears, you lean in and hit the button to be pissed on by luke warm water that is so hard it leaves white marks in the air around it. “Don’t worry son, no one can see you cry. Let it aaaaallll out” you mumble.

Showered and relatively clean, the whole debacle of drying yourself whilst standing in ankle deep slurry begins and the tears roll once again. But, you learn. And you learn quickly. It’s a good option and you won’t get arrested. You learn why everyone in front of you wears flip flops. You learn how to get dressed without getting wet from Satan’s piss pot. You learn what the best time is to almost guarantee a vacant queue free showering experience, the bad services where they never, ever get cleaned and the good ones where you feel like you’ve won a luxury shower experience for one! You learn to have a poo before you shower for a totally fresh feeling, and above all, your mates remain your mates and you no longer have that awkwardness of being naked in someone else’s house.

One of the earliest uses—perhaps the earliest use—of "OMG" appeared in a letter to the then-member of Parliament, as The Atlantic reports. In 1917, British Navy Admiral John Arbuthnot Fisher wrote to Winston Churchill about rumors of new titles that would soon be bestowed. "I hear that a new order of Knighthood is on the tapis," he wrote. "O.M.G. (Oh! My God!)—Shower it on the Admiralty!"