27th March, 2004
Rebirth
Spring is in the air and with spring comes life. In celebration of another winter survived, I thought I’d republish one of my favorite entries from a different incarnation of mine. I give you: the story of the unisex bathroom. As a preface to this story, I’d like to say that another one of the “perks” of working with 95% women is that there isn’t even a men’s restroom at my workplace. Instead, we menfolk are forced to share a unisex restroom with the rest of the staff, even though there is a female-only one right down the hall. Thank god the unisex is a single-seater.
With its elongated bowl and 1.6 gallon water saving flush, the toilet in the unisex restroom is not only clean in design but also environmentally friendly. I like to call it “Uni”, partly because I find it necessary to amuse myself while in between such life-saving matters as clearing printer jams and asking if the Caps Lock key is on and partly because I find that giving a cutesy name to a device that threatens to suck my waif-like body into its cavernous depths with its high pressure flush somehow makes it less scary. (Although I shudder to think of what sort of mental state I’d be in if we had the Instanto 3.5 gpf version of this toilet installed instead. The Instanto 3.5 model features something called a “blowout flush action” – a colorful description, to say the least, and something that scares the bejeezus out of me to just think about).
But I digress. Since it’s a single-seater, a great deal of your anonymity is taken away simply because you run the risk of finishing your business then opening the door only to find someone’s mother standing outside. I’m sure Freud had a clever word for the chaotic rush of feelings you get when this first happens to you, but I’ll just call it “unsettling” and leave it at that. Lucky for me, I’m a fairly tidy person so my daily activities have not been all that affected – until now, that is. You see, we now have a new delivery truck driver, let’s call him Shakes, who likes to visit Uni when he stops by to do his delivery truck thing. Shakes, who evidently takes a lot of B vitamins, has a problem with his aim and tends to miss the bowl. A lot. This means that, on those occasions when I am fortunate enough to be the next person to visit Uni after Shakes has done his deed, I’m faced with the dilemma of cleaning up after him or leaving his offerings where they lay and taking the risk of walking out of a disgustingly dirty restroom only to find someone’s mother standing outside. Such is my life.
Posted at 9:05 pm | Comment (0)
27th March, 2004
Well Said
This is slightly old, but I thought it deserved mention. Rant.
Posted at 8:47 pm | Comment (0)
27th March, 2004
Never Forget
I see that this photojournal of the current state of Chernobyl, site of one of the worst man-made disasters in history, has been updated. Sobering, indeed.
Posted at 8:46 pm | Comment (0)
