The Bathroom at Work

If you follow me on Twitter, you’ve heard me complaining on and off for years about the bathroom here at work–the blood, the poop smears, the peeing on the seats, the weird crap wiped on walls, etc. I mean, every morning it looks fine, so it’s not like the cleaning crew is slacking, but damn, I mean, the blood? Clearly not menstrual blood. I actually checked under the sink to make sure no one was dying.

And I am on the third floor of a building very difficult to get in. It’s not like people are just wandering in off the streets to defile our bathroom. Someone who works in this building with me is a toxic mess.

But I have sympathy for Ms. Mess today, because I used the middle stall, which, of course is the least used stall in the bathroom unless the bathroom is full. If the bathroom is empty, you use the big stall at the end. If you come in and the big stall is in use, you use the first stall.

And I realized, the middle stall is a death trap! There’s a shelf on the right, as you are sitting on the toilet, that actually juts over the toilet seat. So, in order to sit on the seat, you have have to swerve right, which could easily result in some seat-peeing, and then, as you come down, bam, your hand can easily (as mine did) hit the corner of the waste thingy. I didn’t bleed (nor pee on the seat), but I could easily see how you could.

So, now, I’m not thinking that there’s just some terrible gross mess of a human being who shares my bathroom. I think someone has been actually maimed and disoriented by that middle stall.

I can’t believe it’s legal to have things actually jutting into your butt-space, but I don’t know. If there were some ADA-police, I’d love for them to check that bathroom out.

Anyway, I drew a diagram to illustrate the problem, because I’m Scientific like that.

The World is Hard and Small

It’s weird, these big natural disasters in places like Japan and Australia. This morning, we woke up to the news and our first thought was “Holy shit, C. is there!” He is fine. But you turn on the news and you watch for a little bit anyway and I just couldn’t bring myself to say anything. And I realized that I didn’t say anything, either, about the flooding in Australia, even though that freaked me the fuck out and I was worried about the folks from Australia who read here. But what do you say?

Shit like this happens all the time, has happened all the time, just now, we can literally know about it as it’s happening anywhere in the world. And we  hear real people’s voices unfiltered by the media and they feel more real, because they aren’t just people you see on the news, but are people whose blogs you read or who are in your twitter stream.

Hearing real people in pain or scared or suffering and knowing there’s really nothing you can do to ease it is terrible.

Everything seems so trite–the people saying it would have been worse if not for Japan’s warning systems and strict building codes. Yes, true, but what comfort will that be to the families of the dead? Or anything I could say, a stranger a world away.