Earlier this week, a column about
office bathrooms appeared on the City Paper website. This brought up
a slew of bad memories from my time in corporate hell. In addition
to the previous bit of awfulness that I had described here,
flashbacks to other instances came flooding out of the depths of my
brain.
Over the course of twenty years, I
have worked at four different buildings around town for the same
company. Each location has been a nightmare in some way, shape or
form when it comes to the restrooms.
Lightbulbs blow out and never get
replaced so donning a reading light or a miner's helmet is necessary
when something goes south. Hot water tanks have broken and have
taken a fiscal quarter to be repaired. Someone had once ripped a
paper towel dispenser off of the wall and it was replaced with an
additional soap dispenser. At one location, the thermometer for the
radiator broke so the heat was on full blast 24/7. It would get so
hot that the door handle on the outside of the bathroom would be warm
to the touch.
There is no one to reach out to
directly to fix maintenance problems. There is a website to submit
building issues to and the mythical “they” will get to them when
they get to them. I'm sure this is part of the company initiative to
make it suck so bad to come to work that everyone will quit.
I have survived the bathroom at CBGB's
and lived to tell the tale. What some of my fellow humans have done
in an office setting is downright fucking bizarre compared to
anything that I witnessed go down at CB's. Since I probably spend
more time at work than anywhere else, I try to treat the men's room
with a little more respect than the trough at the average sports
stadium.
One of my earliest encounters with the
weirdness of office bathrooms was when I worked the evening shift at
a building downtown. I walked into the restroom to find a group of
homeless men freshening up in the sinks while in varying states of
undress. There was an odor that I could only describe as a punch in
the nervous system. These guys clearly needed to wash up. As I am
no rat, I politely turned around, exited the bathroom and ventured to
one of the other floors in the building. I'm guessing that they
gained access to the building because of the post 9/11 vigilance of
the security guard that could usually be found sleeping at the front
desk.
There was also a guy that used to make his
morning oatmeal in the men's room. That is not a euphemism. He
would literally dump a packet of oatmeal into a bowl and mix it with
hot water out of the tap. In the men's room. Instead of using the
sink in the kitchenette that was around the corner from the bathroom. He would make his oatmeal after he did his lunges across the row of
stalls and urinals. He would also try to have a conversation with
anyone and everyone that would have poor enough timing to end up in
the bathroom at the same time as him. While he was making his
breakfast and doing his exercises. As if using a public bathroom
wasn't harrowing enough, let's add in food prep, a Jane Fonda workout
and an unhealthy dose of idle chit chat.
Then there was the guy that would
gorge himself on McDonald's until he would end up in the bathroom
heaving it all back up. Every day he would come walking into the
building with a large enough bag of food that you'd think he bought
it for his work group but no. He would sit in the common area and
jam McMuffins and pancakes in his face until start time and within
the first hour of his shift he'd completely destroy the bathroom for
everyone else in the office for the rest of the day since the
cleaning crew only showed up once a day.
More recently, there was a member of
management that was always in the bathroom yelling into his cellphone
while on conference calls. Not only would he talk at ear splitting
volumes, he would slam the stall doors and flush multiple times, not
really concerned with concealing the fact that he was in the shitter
to all of the other people on the conference call while his phone was on
speaker. And I'm astonished that this animal didn't have a
persistent case of pink eye. He wouldn't think to put the phone down
long enough to wash his hands. He would go from the stall, right out
the door and touch everything along the way back to his office. I
wouldn't have been shocked to have seen him scoot along the floor on
his bare ass at some point. Luckily, he failed upward and took a job
somewhere else in the company so he now has the opportunity to wipe
his butt germs all over a different building.
Humans are gross and unbearably
selfish creatures that don't seem to pay too much attention to their
impact on the world around them. They don't really think more than
five minutes ahead of where they currently are. And if things don't
affect them directly, then who gives a shit, someone else will have
to deal with it. No wonder our species is walking backwards into
extinction with blinders on.
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