I have all kinds of long blog posts planned in my head – but no time to write them! So instead I will share a short but disturbing tale of horror from my office. Specifically, the dreaded unisex office bathroom*.<\/p>\n
Now, on a good day I actually like my nearest loos. Those of us on even-numbered floors get two of the single room, self-contained type, with everything including the the sink hidden safely behind a lockable door. People on the odd numbered floors get the inferior, but at least gender-segregated, multi-stall bathrooms. (They often prefer to use ours instead, causing some long waits at times). I don’t really mind sharing with my male colleagues. I just wish they would remember to a) flush and b) lock the door; I’ve walked in on three different guys in the last year, including two different guys on one particularly memorable day.<\/p>\n
So. My story. I entered one of the bathrooms yesterday to find that someone had lovingly draped a long piece of loo paper over the wall-mounted handrail. And I do mean long – almost touching the floor at both ends. It looked perfectly clean and dry. I can only assume that some environmentally conscious person had taken too much paper from the roll and, rather than waste it by flushing it away like a normal person<\/s>, left the unused portion for the next visitor.<\/p>\n
Am I just being squeamish and untrusting, or is this an example of horrible unisex office bathroom etiquette? Or just horrible bathroom etiquette in general? (I definitely wouldn’t do this at home, even though I only share with my husband).<\/p>\n
I obviously didn’t touch the paper. But it was gone a few hours later. I don’t think the cleaners had been in, because there were no new rolls of paper and the bin was still full of paper towels. I really, really hope that the <\/span>person who took it was the same person who left it there in the first place…<\/p>\n ———————<\/p>\n *I did my postdoc on a different floor of the same building. We kept trying to segregate the bathrooms by sex – a logical step, you’d think, especially as one of the two rooms on each even-numbered floor has features required only by women – but some unknown person kept ripping the “Men” and “Women” signs down and putting them in the trash. Apparently this was a building-wide phenomenon. People on all floors have now given up and accepted their unisex betoileted state.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I have all kinds of long blog posts planned in my head – but no time to write them! So instead I will share a short but disturbing tale of horror from my office. Specifically, the dreaded unisex office bathroom*. … Continue reading