Have you heard of stories or have a personal experience of being locked in a toilet? Well, just to cheer myself up (and all of you out there), I thought I’d share some ‘toilet humour’.
One day when the cousins had an outing at Midvalley Megamall, the eldest girl needed to go to the loo. Since it was a public holiday, the rest of us knew that there was going to be a very long queue so we told her we would wait for her at the nearby shops. After nearly 10 minutes have passed, we all went to see what was the hold-up. Surely the queue couldn’t be that bad.
As we stood outside the entrance, one of us went to check the line but when we couldn’t find her anywhere, we thought she must still be in the loo or has gone out to find us. Just as I was about to dial her number, her name popped up on my caller screen.
“Where are you? Still in the toilet?” I asked.
“You have to come help me. I’m stuck,” my eldest cousin replied, slightly panicked.
“Stuck? What do you mean stuck? Stuck where?”
“I’m stuck in the toilet.”
“How can you be stuck there?”
“I can’t get the door to open. I’ve been trying and trying. Pushing, pulling, it won’t open,” her voice rising slightly through the speaker.
Laughing, I told the girls what was happening and all four of us went helter-skelter into the washroom. We called her name to find which stall she was in and she stuck her foot out from under the very first stall. The women queuing for the toilet just watched the impromptu entertainment show as we tugged and pushed the door. It was true, it wouldn’t open. We asked her to try the lock again but she said she had turned it all the way and it still wouldn’t open.
Just as we thought we needed to get hold of the maintanence people, I saw that the outside lock had a groove that would just fit a Malaysian 10 cent coin. Vaguely remembering a scene from somewhere, I dug out a coin from my jean pocket and fitted it into the lock and turned.
Lo and behold, the toilet door opened.
When she saw us, she fiercely hugged the closest cousin to her and instead of coming out, she dragged the cousin into the stall to prove that the lock was indeed faulty. Apparently, even though the latch was turned all the way, after years of wear and tear, a small piece of it managed to get stuck in the lock, creating (cue eerie music) ‘the toilet stall that can never be opened from the inside’.
And so we left, laughing and teasing her as we went on with our shopping, and later in the day, we returned to the same washroom as another cousin needed to answer the call of nature. There, we discovered that yet another poor soul has gotten herself stuck in the toilet and her friend had to call the cleaning lady, who was there at the time, to open the door. She used the exact same coin trick I had earlier. The thing is instead of locking the stall to prevent further use (and further imprisonment), the cleaning lady just left it as it is. I pity the woman who would be the foul demonic stall’s next victim. I’ll pity her even more if she was all alone and it was near the mall’s closing time with no one around to notice her predicament. 
