Held Hostage by the Secret Service!

A funny story about water intake and national security….I work in space shuttle operations. We had a launch scheduled yesterday, but it was scrubbed due to a mechanical problem. Management scheduled a meeting Friday afternoon to discuss the game plan for the weekend. The meeting was held in the Launch Control Center, and the President was scheduled to stop by sometime that afternoon to meet with the astronauts and Congresswoman Giffords. As a result, the building was crawling with Secret Service guys in dark suits and earpieces and talking into their cuffs. We had to go through a metal detector just to get into our meeting.

Just as the meeting is about to start, they announce that the room is being locked down and we can’t leave until the President has left. Our meeting lasted about an hour, and then we had to wait….and wait….and wait….Now I’m a good little fitness do-bee and I drink water all day. In fact, I’d brought my water bottle to the meeting with me, but I stopped drinking as soon as they announced the lockdown, because I know that my bladder has a 90-minute timer, and I thought it best not to push my luck.
Of course, after an hour and a half, I started to get that feeling…you know, the one where you’re becoming uncomfortably aware of your full bladder. I tried not to think about it, but the more you try to NOT think about it, the more you do. Now when it comes to Presidential security, the Secret Service doesn’t care a whit about my bladder, but I’m wondering how long this torture will last? If I raise a ruckus about it, I may very well find my next bathroom break at the county jail. Meanwhile, things are really starting to get critical, and I’m wondering if anyone would notice if I snuck off into the corner with a trash can and, um, solved the problem?

Fortunately, just as I’m about to discreetly approach the security guys and plead my case, they allowed us to leave out a back door and down a back staircase away from the area where the President was. I had to go down four flights of stairs to reach the lobby where the bathroom was, and I never went down a flight of stairs so fast!

Sometimes there is a humorous downside to our new healthy lifestyle! :drinker: Perhaps I should start carrying Depends with me just in case? :blushing: