Ensign’s Log — Spent three hours practicing clarinet today for Neelix’s upcoming Talent Night and used up all of my Holodeck time using one of Tom’s programs… I don’t need to elaborate.

It was a long day, but at least Ensign Boylan took up night duty.

Worked an infuriating shift with B’Elanna Torres trying to fix some bugs in the EPS conduits on deck 5. We also had to install some extra memory for the Emergency Medical Hologram. B’Elanna spent half the time arguing with him before switching off his program.

Had to stick around to speak with the doctor about the medical issues I’ve been having lately. As I’ve talked about before, Intrepid class ships aren’t built for comfort. Sure, it’s meant for deep space exploration, but it had to make a few exceptions to keep the ship “clean”.

I remember when we had that Starfleet Academy Waste Extractor Seminar and thought it was the most ludicrous device ever invented. Well, what I wouldn’t give to have a few of those anywhere in the ship, but what we’ve got is the latest in Transporter technology.

Sit down on the “toilet”, push the button, and the waste is transported out of your body and right into the extraction system.

Transported! What every happened to using your normal bodily functions?

The doctor says there’s nothing wrong with me, but I can’t help feel like I’ve gotten some irritable transporter psychosis bowel syndrome. I’ve heard more complaints about them over the ship’s intranet than I have about Neelix’s food.

There are a lot of things I miss about Earth, but being 75,000 light years away really makes me miss the little things. God, I miss toilets. There’s something to be said for having a place to sit down, read a book, and maybe even play the clarinet.

I could be tooting while pooping… Computer, save that joke in my private files. Tom will love that one.

Late yesterday, I started working on a toilet simulator for the Holodeck. Understandably, I’m keeping the file pretty closely guarded.

I’m using some information from the historic databases to create a wide selection of shapes and sizes. I’ve got some low-flow ones and high-flow ones, and you wouldn’t believe the debate about those in early 20th century Earth.

There are also some pretty interesting schematics from our database surrounding Japan at the turn of the century. They had ones with automatic bidets! Got to work on the plumbing before I got to the prototyping stage.

I also managed to recreate some Cardassian-style toilets too, but they’re fairly hard to recreate. They’re basically just these platforms that jut out from the wall with a hole in them… weird, but functional. Surprisingly little information about the toilets from other cultures out there. I’m really starting to wonder if there’s another Harry Kim out there on a Vulcan ship suffering like I am…

I’ve also taken some inspiration from the Bajorans and the Ferengi who both have some information available about their waste extractors. Apparently, someone on Deep Space 9 was once able to use some seofurane he found near the rim of an extractor aboard a Bajoran ship to track down a murderer, so much for clean space travel.

Tomorrow, I’ll be helping out again in engineering. The communication array has been on the fritz and B’Elanna has been on my case about recalibrating them. I can’t tell if she’s just angry cause of the Klingon in her or if she just hates me.

There seems to be some errant data clogging up the servers around the ship, maybe Tom’s been creating more Holonovels.

Stardate 49958.3

Captain Janeway called me into her Ready Room in the afternoon. They did a purge of the Holoprograms once they found out about Tom’s secret stash. Apparently she found a few of mine mixed in there…

I’m now leading a taskforce to improve the waste extraction system around the ship.

I will never hear the end of this…