A Long Ramble with a Simple Bathroom Moral
While introducing himself at the first meeting of all the residents of my dorm floor during my first week in college, my next door neighbor claimed one of the four bathroom stalls for the remainder of the year as his own. Other people were allowed to use it, of course. He was just marking some territory and, essentially, warning others that they would have to contend with whatever it was he decided he was going to do in there for the next 9 months. Was he serious? I think he was, although we never monitored his bathroom habits, save for the time someone found him passed out with half of his body inside a running shower stall and half of it splayed out on the floor.
The reason I bring this up is because I’m having trouble with the concept of the office bathroom. I’ve never been one for public toilets anyway, but gone are the days when I could realistically head home when the appropriate stimuli made themselves known. As 1 of only 4 men in an office of approximately 60 people, it’s not hard to figure out who is using the men’s toilet. I, for example, have used the exact same stall and more or less the exact same times of day for the last year and a half. This situation presents a slight moral dilemma. For example, because I use this same stall, and because I happen to drink a lot of coffee, I am consistently driving down the resale value the sweet, efficient toilet. Also, all three of my male colleagues know exactly what I’m doing and, depending on their olfactory and problem-solving abilities, what I ate for dinner the previous night.
To move on to an example that does not involve me, at least not directly, only three of the four male employees here wash their hands after completing their business. This too has a connection to my college days: one of my floor mates did not believe in washing his hands after handling parts of his anatomy that had direct connections to Hepatitis A and other communicable diseases. This, in a word, is disgusting. What’s more disgusting is that this not-so-fine gentleman enjoyed playing Tetris on my roommate’s computer. How we survived, I’ll never know. Flash-forward to today: with all the SARS and bird flu fears that are just flying at you like an F/A-18 Hornet, you would think that hand-washing would be a no-brainer. This would be true if everyone had a brain, which they don’t. The astounding idiocy of inability of this gentleman to wash his hands is further compounded by the fact that I work in a goddamn public health organization! Where’s the Department of Homeland Security on this one? Honestly, he’s going to kill us all.
What’s more, our office bathrooms are located in the main thoroughfare of our office. Our floor is divided into three long columns, and the bathrooms are located down the central columns somewhat near the elevator and stairwell entrance. Also along this column are the break room (where the coffee lives) and the mail/copy room, where the photocopier and ever-so-fun paper-shredder live. Now, if I’m having a very boring day and I want to go shred some paper, I have to potentially pass people coming out of the bathroom. This is awkward, because I know with fairly good certainty what they just did in the bathroom, and I don’t like it. I don’t care if it’s the other guy who, for some reason, brushes and flosses his teeth three times a day (and DOESN’T clean the food particles off of the mirror), I do NOT want to engage in any sort of recognition or conversational process with anyone emerging from the toilet. And yet I’m forced to, because the hallways aren’t quite big enough to just go around someone- instead you have to kind of angle your body in such a way that it makes you look like you’re failing an audition for Soul Train.
To sum up, I should be given my own bathroom and direct access to said bathroom within the safety of my own office. Everyone else should be forced to go somewhere else to do whatever it is they have to do. And the love of SARS people, please, wash your goddamn hands!
August 3rd, 2006 at 5:55 pm
Once there was a Far Side cartoon in which an alarm rang if you didn’t wash your hands upon leaving the bathroom. I thought that was pretty funny.