As a summer intern for Rolling Stone, I quickly realized that my colleagues got their kicks from the small stuff: too often, I’d hear, “I got to get such-and-such editor a sandwich” or “Oh my god, that’s the tissue Bjork just sneezed into!” Granted, getting worked up over such minutiae is one of the best ways to network from the bottom of the totem pole: “Hey, Mr. Editor, remember me? I’m the guy that was channeling the Kabbalah to get the copy machine to work. Where are you going? It was a joke! I don’t even like Madonna!”

So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the RS interns take real pleasure in transcribing interviews of the stars they care about. Getting to listen to Q&As offers a brief taste of “being on the inside”: for a few hours, interns can pretend that they’re the magazine’s liaison to Jeff Bridges or Jack White. With one of my transcriptions, though, I got a real treat; something I can tell my grandkids about. I got to hear will.i.am take a shit

I can’t exactly prove this, but the clues were there: the signature echo, a couple of loud whirrs that sounded a lot like flushing (a courtesy flush the first time around, perhaps?), loud talking that faded in and out as if it was on the outside of a swinging bathroom door, and a bunch of shuffling immediately before and after each whirr. Half-an-hour into the interview, after one such flush-scramble, will said, “Can you ask me that question again so I can, uh, answer it?” Oh yes, it was an epic shit.

While typing will.i.am’s every word, I couldn’t help but ruminate on the endless possibilities: “Where is the Dump,” “Poopalicious,” “Yes We Can…Crap.” Maybe his straining had unexpectedly yielded another Fergie album? The task at hand became increasingly difficult as I slowly remembered that I had the sense of humor of a fifth grader. I simultaneously regretted and appreciated this fact.

Regardless, I finally had a way to answer my friends who kept asking me about all the “cool stuff” I was getting to do, expecting to hear about how, while touring with Kanye, I lost my virginity 18 times to Miley Cyrus and wrote a movie about it. Another man’s trash had turned into my treasure. If only Obama was cueing up a game of BattleShits in the next stall…