Ben Elton - Inconceivable

Anyway, as I say, I slunk in and sat down as far away from any of the others as I could and almost immediately another man arrived. Luckily for me he must have done it before because the first thing he did was go to the empty desk and sign something before sitting down. Instantly I was on the alert! Was there some queueing system of which I was unaware? Did one clock in for a toss? On sneaking over and inspecting the desk I realized that there was indeed a system. “Please sign list on arrival and wait for your name to come up,” it said on the form. On the form, that is, not on a big poster on the wall, but on a poxy little form on a clipboard on a desk. Couldn’t they have put “Smoking may harm your unborn child” on the little form and “Sign up!” on a great big poster?

So now, instead of being fifth man in, I was sixth. I thought for a moment about appealing to the man who came in after me, explaining that I had in fact been there before him but did not know about signing the form. I didn’t, of course. Let me tell you now that one thing I learned today is that nobody talks to anybody in the wanking queue. The hospital could be burning down and we’d all rather burn to death than shout “Fire!” You sit, and you wait.

Anyway, the long minutes ticked by and at nine o’clock a couple of nurses emerged from various corridors and began to take an interest in things. By this time three more men had turned up and we were being forced to sit right next to each other on the little square of chairs, which nobody liked at all. One of the nurses went to the desk and called out the first name. Up gets the bloke, goes to the desk, gets his pot and is directed down the corridor to the wanking room.

So now we all know the score. One room. One fucking room. We’re going in one at a time in a slow, agonizing tosser chain. Each of us realizes that the amount of time that we’re going to have to spend in that hellhole is entirely dependent on those in front of us in the queue. The chain moves at the speed of the slowest wanker.

After about ten minutes the door at the end of the corridor opened and the first man hurried out. He dropped his pot off at a little hatch in the wall, handed some kind of plastic-coated form back to the nurse and he was out, lucky swine. After what I considered an unnecessary minute or two of faffing about, the nurse called out the next name and up got another man, picked up his pot and the plastic-coated form and trundled down the corridor to the masturbation chamber. I must say I found this plastic-coated form a bit disconcerting. What was it? Wanking instructions? Surely most men were up to speed on that one? And plastic-coated. T hat was a bit of a gross touch, I must say.

It’s always struck me as a strange thing about instructions in general, the way people feel the need to give them out whatever the circumstances. Perhaps it makes us feel more in control, like the way we still give all the details on an outgoing answerphone message: “If you’d like to leave a message please speak clearly after the tone.” I mean, we all know that, don’t we? Perhaps we should add, “Oh, and don’t forget to put the receiver back afterwards or your phone will be rendered useless.” Lucy and I had a frozen pie last night and on the box it said “Remove cardboard box before putting in the oven.” I mean I suppose some people might make a mistake with that, but surely it’s better to let them learn by experience or else one day they’ll be near a fire with some cardboard and no instructions and hurt themselves.

The ballpoint pens they give us at work have a warning embossed on the plastic tops advising us not to put them in our mouths as choking might ensue. That is a fact. I’m not making it up. Surely the same thing could be said for eggcups or toilet roll tubes or carpets? The world is definitely going mad.

Anyway, back to the tosser queue. The next bloke in took nearly fifteen minutes. Fifteen minutes to have a wank! I mean I’ve pulled them off in fifteen seconds in my time! I could see I was not the only one who thought this. Everybody was shuffling their feet a bit and looking at their watches. Eventually, of course, he emerged, and nearly ran past us to get out of the place, and so the long day wore on. There was a coffee machine available. I say coffee but what I mean is hot water with little brown islands floating in it. Worse than useless, really. Strange, I mean we all knew the machine served liquid shit but because it said it served coffee we drank the stuff. If it had said “Liquid Shit” machine I suppose we would have left it alone. Instructions, you see, we’re all caught in the headlights.

Finally at gone quarter to ten, my number came up. “Mr Bell,” the lady said. It had to be a woman, of course. Like when you’re a kid buying condoms at Boots, you could wait for hours for a lad to take over the till but he never did and you had to buy them off a teenage girl your own age. Anyway, the nurse gave me my pot and the plastic-coated instructions, and when I say plastic-coated, I don’t mean neatly laminated, no, I mean a twenty-year-old form in an old plastic bag. That form has seen some sights, I bet.

“Last room on the left,” said the nurse. “When you’ve finished leave your pot at the lab hatch and return the form to me.”

Well, I must say I’ve masturbated in more pleasant environments. Don’t misunderstand me: I don’t think that the NHS should be consuming its precious resources providing sensually lit boudoirs draped in red velvet and reeking of sultry scents for sad acts like me to wank in. I’m just saying it was all a bit depressing.

There was a chair, a magazine rack, a handbasin and a waste-paper basket in the room. That was it. Apart from that it was completely bare. The plastic-coated instructions informed me that I should carefully wash my hands and knob before getting down to the business of the morning. Already in the wastebasket were the crumpled paper handtowels of the previous tossers on which they had no doubt dried not only their hands but also their knobs. Strange to think that only moments before I had entered the room another man had been… I decided not to think about it.

So I scrubbed up and viewed the chair. It was a municipal easy-chair consisting of an upright and a horizontal cushion. The sort of chair you would have found in the teachers’ common room of a secondary modern school in about 1970. I regret to have to report that it was stained, not in a truly horrid way, but just with age. There was a dark triangle on the front of the seat, left where a million men’s legs had worn the material around it. In the magazine rack were some old dirty mags. It’s a long time since I’ve seen the inside of a dirty mag and for a moment I thought, “Hello, bonus,” but really, you just couldn’t get into them at all, they were so old . I don’t mean interestingly old, like 1960 or something. Just old; about three years or so. On the wall there was a sign saying, and I kid you not, that any donations of spare “reading material” would be welcomed. Reading! We live in a world where five-year-olds can dial up snuff movies on the Internet and yet a hospital calls wank mags “reading material”.

I don’t know why they don’t just write to Penthouse . I’m sure the publishers would be delighted to make a donation to assist all those men in making their donations.

Then suddenly I became aware of the time!

Oh my God, I must have been in that room for two or three minutes already! Instantly I had a vision of all the men outside, shuffling their feet, looking at their watches, thinking to themselves, “How long does it take to toss yourself off, for fuck’s sake!” Just as I had been cruelly thinking myself only moments before. Suddenly I was convinced that they were all out there gnashing their teeth and muttering, “He’s reading the articles in the magazines, I’m sure of it.”