Have you watched Chevy Chase’s Christmas Vacation?  Remember his Cousin Eddy?  One of the not so pleasant parts of living fulltime in an RV or boat is dealing with sh*t, literally, sh*t.  If you’ve lived in an RV or boat you belong to one of two groups: those who’ve had problems with their tanks or those who will have problems with their tanks.  As of now, we belong to the latter, and I hope to keep it that way for a very long time. 

But as you know, sh*t happens.  Even if you don’t want it to, sh*t happens.  Our campsite at Main Street Casino RV Park came with a shared pedestal for all services.  That is to say that from one pedestal placed between two campsites came two electric hookups, two water hookups, and one big open sewer dump.  All of the other places where we’ve stayed until now had individual sewer connections unique to each site. 

With my disposable plastic gloves on, I’m ok with handling the set-up, tear-down, and dumping of our waste tanks.  I clean the toilets inside too despite being slightly OCD about sh*t.  Mostly I try to keep in mind that it’s just our sh*t.  I’m thankful that I don’t have to deal with other people’s sh*t.  That would be a sh*tty job.  So in setting up our sewer hose in Las Vegas, Brian and I decided that we would leave the cap on the end of our hose and would place it in the common dump area only when we needed to dump our tanks.  In theory, this placement would prevent our neighbor’s sh*t from comingling with our hose.

And it worked.  Our hose maintained its freedom from other people’s sh*t the whole time we were there.  I only had one problem.  When I went to dump our tanks, I didn’t want to touch our neighbor’s hose, which had been left dangling in the sewer drain.  So, I removed the cap from our hose, placed it in the compartment next to our neighbor’s hose, pulled valves to drain our black and then our gray tanks, and removed our hose again from the compartment.  The problem was that as I replaced the cap on our hose, the door that slid up to reveal the sewer dump area, slammed down on our neighbor’s hose.  Like a guillotine during the French Revolution, the door completely severed the end of their hose.

I went inside, disposed of my gloves, washed my hands, and hoped they would not be too angry.  I had to confess.  The last thing that I wanted was for them to empty their tanks without looking at their hose and find shit all over the ground everywhere.  Several unanswered knocks at their door, I returned to our rig to write a note about the mishap.  Later that afternoon, our neighbor greeted me at the car door the moment I returned from errand running.  I apologized.  I told the story of how it happened.  I certainly hadn’t intended it to happen.  I offered a spare hose we had onboard.  I offered money to help pay for the replacement of their hose.  He didn’t want any of it, including, I think, my apology.  

Mind you, these sewer hoses don’t last very long, and you can buy a new extension (like what I had accidentally chopped in half) for about $20.  According to our neighbor, I should have removed their hose before dumping our tanks.  “What!?!” I thought to myself.  I’m not handling someone else’s sh*t intentionally, even armed with gloves.   Instead of arguing or trying to explain further, I shrugged my shoulders, apologized again saying, “Sorry.  I guess sh*t happens.”