The Smallest Office

I think when they constructed the toilets in my office building they left out some of the more expensive bits, like ventilation. This office is not even ten years old and was presumably built with the benefit of the very latest in latrine engineering but in spite of this I walked in to take a piss this afternoon and was greeted with a smell like a dirty protest being carried out by three tramps in a prison cell. I honestly wondered if someone had curled one down on the floor, maybe caught short as a result of one of the more offensive cafeteria offerings from lunch time.

The men's toilet has two urinals and two cubicles, the latter barely separated by metal-clad dividers so that you're practically sharing the shitter with the bloke next to you. (I haven't checked out the ladies' but I'm sure it's got couches in case they need to lie down, giant tampon dispensers, heated seats, luxury soaps, real towels and thick pile carpet.) This means that in the unfortunate event that you feel the need to have a shit on company time (and, let's face it, for some of us that's the most productive we get) you really don't want anyone in the other cubicle. I don't know about you but I loath having to share the sounds and smells of someone else's defecation when science has provided a perfectly good mechanism to prevent this. It's called a wall; I hear they've been around for years and are very popular. No walls in our company shitter though (in common with most toilets in the US), just dividers that you could probably limbo under, a sobering thought if you're hoping to avoid advances from Larry Craig and his buddies.

So you can do the "drive-by" and swing into the toilet casually, checking if either of the cubicles is occupied; if so you can divert to the sink and just wash your hands, or turn and head back out as if it's the most natural thing in the world, prior to checking out a different toilet. Let's suppose you get lucky and claim a cubicle. You check for piss on the seat (why do people piss on the seat?) and the presence of toilet paper; everything is ready, so it's pants-down and settle in. As if by some homing instinct some other fucker suddenly decides that now is the time for them to disgorge the reheated vegetable lasagne from lunch. You hear them come into the cubicle next to you. They start arranging paper on the seat in an elaborate prelude to sitting down. You're thinking "Fuck off! Fuck off! Fuck off!" They pull down their pants and you try and imagine you're somewhere else. Anywehere else. There's some initial grunting, and then a succession of "pffsqulllch" and "splosh", punctuated by farting. You wish they would die. Now.

Why is it so hard to get a few minutes peace and quiet for a shit? Would it kill the company to make the facilities better? I have a cooktop at home that is fitted with a downdraft ventilation system to remove cooking smells. Bear in mind that cooking smells good, kind of by design - after all you're going to eat it so it had better smell pleasant. Shit, by contrast does not smell good. I don't know anyone who looks forward to walking into a toilet to be confronted with the odor of someone else's bowel contents. So why the fuck don't they put a decent ventilator on the shitter? Instead we get a stupid dispenser in the corner which occasionally, for no apparent reason, makes a small grating noise and emits a tiny amount of some alleged air freshener. Now, in place of the smell of shit you get the smell of shit with a very small admixture of cheap citrus substitute. Nice.

And another thing: since when did we all get so paranoid about energy usage that we installed motion sensors to turn the lights off? I have found that there's a bog on the ground floor with low traffic - the risk of someone trampling all over your private shit time is minimal. But if you're struggling with a fudgy one - you know, the ones that take a bit of time to work out - suddenly there's a click and the lights go out. Now you're sitting in the dark with your pants round your ankles. You can wipe and go, but here's the thing: wiping is a visual activity. If you can't see, how do you know when you're done?

This is the twenty-first century; we have created powerful microprocessors smaller than a postage stamp and can link people all around the world, enabling them to exchange information at the touch of a button. And porn, too. So why is it so difficult to create a half-decent place for your valued employees to take a dump? Are you really worried that if it's too nice and private they'll hide out in there all day? Trust me, nature has already taken care of that: after fifteen minutes you lose all sensation in your legs and have to go back to your desk. I rest my case.


Copyright © 2008 Edward Bison