STALL OF FAME:
“THE TINDER POO DATE”
It’s a sad fact of life: if you’re old enough to go on dates, you’ve probably had at least one “date from hell.” But can you top this one? It took place in Bristol, England, and went so badly that it made headlines and earned the unfortunate couple a spot in our Stall of Fame.
ON A ROLL
In the summer of 2017, a Bristol University graduate student named Liam Smith, 24, met a woman (unnamed in news reports, for reasons that will become clear in a moment) using the dating app Tinder. He liked her and she liked him, so they agreed to go for dinner and drinks at Nando’s, a popular Portuguese restaurant in Bristol. That part of the date went well—so well, in fact, that the happy pair went back to Smith’s flat to watch a movie on Netflix. About an hour into the movie, the woman excused herself to use the bathroom. That’s when the trouble started: The woman had to go “number two,” and it was only after she did so that she realized that Smith’s toilet was malfunctioning. It would not flush.
Had the pair known each other even a little bit better, the story would probably have ended there. One of them would have found a way to fix or flush the toilet, and the unfortunate occurrence would be quickly forgotten. But remember, this was their first date—and the woman panicked.
Remember, this was their first date—and the woman panicked.
THE PLOT THICKENS
Rather than admit to her new friend that she had a problem, the woman wadded up some toilet paper and used it to—carefully—pluck her poo out of the toilet, then she wrapped the offending item in more toilet paper and tossed it out the bathroom window, which opened at the top. That’s how she learned that the bathroom window was no ordinary bathroom window.
“Unfortunately, owing to a design quirk of my house, the toilet window does not in fact open to the garden, but instead into a narrow gap of about a foot and a half, separated from the outside world by another (non-opening) double-glazed window,” Smith writes. “It was into this twilight zone that my date had thrown her poo.” Apparently, the outer window was so clear—or Smith’s date was so panicked—that she did not realize the second window was there until her TP-wrapped poo bounced off of it and landed between the two windows, where it was clearly visible from inside the bathroom.
…wrote in and said, “I can’t see if you are feeding them, so please say you are feeding them out loud.”
The gap between the two windows was narrow and deep—so deep that when the woman tried to reach down to retrieve her imperfectly jettisoned poo, she found that her arms were too short to reach it.
THERE’S SOMETHING YOU SHOULD KNOW
At this point the woman decided to fess up. She exited the bathroom and “with a panicked look in her eye,” told her date what happened. (“It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to say,” she later admitted.) Trying to be helpful, Smith suggested they just smash the window and retrieve the poo that way. But his date had another idea: she was an experienced gymnast, and she thought she could climb through the opening at the top of the inside window and lower herself upside down between the two windows, grab the poo, and with a little help from Smith, pull herself back out again without breaking any glass.
They decided to try it. The woman climbed through the opening at the top of the window and lowered herself into the gap. She reached for the poo…and couldn’t quite get it. So she lowered herself a little further into the gap. She still couldn’t reach her poo. So she lowered herself still further into the gap and…success! She reached the poo and, with a plastic bag covering her hand, bagged it, and handed it up to Smith. He dropped it into the toilet and was able to get the toilet to flush.
A TIGHT SPOT
Now all that remained was to remove the upside-down woman from the narrow gap between the two windows. No such luck: “My hips were wedged in the window,” the woman explained online. Smith spent 15 minutes trying to free her before he gave up and called firefighters, who arrived a short time later and freed her by breaking the window. The woman spent a total of about 30 minutes wedged upside down, and other than a few scratches—and a lot of embarrassment—she was fine.
“My hips were wedged in the window.”
The story might not have spread any further than the couple, the firefighters, and their friends were it not for the fact that Liam Smith is a starving grad student. He didn’t have the £200 (about $350) that he figured he was going to need to fix the window so that his landlord wouldn’t evict him. So he took the woman out on a second date, and over drinks they decided to launch a GoFundMe campaign to raise the money to fix the window. On his GoFundMe page, Smith gave a full account of the incident. He also posted pictures of the windows—with and without the woman wedged upside down in the gap between them—and a photo of the firefighters working to free her. If ever a story was tailor-made to spread quickly across the internet, this was it. Within hours the tale of the “Tinder Poo Date” had tongues wagging all over the world. The BBC contacted the Avon Fire and Rescue service, which confirmed the story. They had indeed “received a call and freed a woman trapped between external and double glazing,” and that “a window was broken in the process.”
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The GoFundMe campaign raised more than $3,500—more than ten times the amount of money needed to replace the window. Smith and his date donated the excess money to two charities: one that supports firefighters in the Bristol area, and another called Toilet Twinning, which builds toilets in the developing world.
At last report the Tinder Poo Date woman was still safely anonymous, and she is remarkably philosophical about what she has been through. “It’s not something I’m proud of, but people are laughing, and if I’m making people happy then I’m not going to complain,” she says. Whether she’ll find love with Liam Smith is another question. “As for a third date,” she told the BBC, “I’m not sure.”
FOOD (NOT) FOR THOUGHT
The concept of throwing food at lousy stage acts predates tomato cultivation. (Tomatoes were introduced to Europe in the 16th century, but many people thought they were poisonous and they didn’t catch on as a popular food until the 19th century.) The first printed reference to pelting speakers with produce is from 63 AD, when Roman emperor Vespasianus Caesar Augustus tried to calm a rioting crowd… and was greeted with a barrage of turnips. At London’s Globe Theatre—where William Shakespeare presented many of his plays in the 17th century—people in the cheap seats (directly in front of the stage) threw rotten eggs at performers. Shakespeare reportedly figured it was because they were getting bored, so he started to write his plays differently, placing serious or emotional scenes just before and after crowd-pleasingly funny, sexy, or violent scenes. The first known instance of a tossed theatrical tomato wasn’t until 1883 in Hempstead, New York. The New York Times reported that while performing in a vaudeville show, a tumbler named John Ritchie was unable to complete a somersault because “a great many tomatoes struck him, throwing him off his balance and demoralizing him.” One tomato hit Ritchie between the eyes and knocked him to the ground. He hightailed it off the stage, dodging tomatoes as he ran.
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