As much as nearly every aspect of corporate life annoys me, there is one thing that never ceases to completely dumbfound me: no one in the corporate world, not even those in the upper echelons of management, knows how to use a toilet without making a complete mess.
At first I thought this might be an isolated event; I thought perhaps it’s just this particular bathroom on this particular floor near my desk. I thought I must have just had bad luck in that the bathroom nearest my desk is the messy one.
Nope!
I realized this was not the case the first time I ventured to the other end of the hall to use that bathroom. I walked in, and what did I see? Shit on the toilet, toilet paper on the floor, and perfectly clean water in the bowl! I don’t even know how it is possible to miss by that much. It’s like they got everything backward.
But it wasn’t just at that company (a large, international firm with stringent entrance requirements). Every company for which I have worked, and even every corporate office and campus I’ve visited, has had bathrooms that looked as if they were used by baby chimpanzees.
Even private bathrooms on the top floors that are reserved exclusively for company owners, presidents, and CEOs are exactly the same! You would think they would be cleaner, since in some cases there are only 2 or 3 people using that bathroom and by basic deduction it would be pretty easy to figure out who made the mess, but no.
The other component of basic bathroom etiquette is hand washing. Now, it’s pretty gross in general to not wash your hands when you’re done in the bathroom (despite the laundry list of reasons people give for not doing so), but this goes ten fold in a corporate environment. Not only do I not want you to touch me or any of my stuff if you haven’t washed your hands, but I really don’t want to get Hepatitis C from the guy who shit on top of the toilet, either.
But what frightens me the most is that I’ve heard the women’s bathrooms are even worse…
Trust me, women’s bathrooms are so much worse. Sometimes I wonder how it is possible for an otherwise, clean-cut, educated woman not to realize that she forgot to flush the toilet. I mean seriously. Isn’t it common practice to flush when you’re finished. And in the exceptional households that institute the “If it’s yellow, let it mellow. If it’s brown, flush it down,” rule, when you are at work, you are allowed to flush regardless of the color. In fact, we highly recommend flushing in every possible circumstance!
If you think bathrooms in a professional evnironment are bad, then go work where there are laborer contracts that use your bathroom. I have literally seen them shit over the top of the toilet onto the wall. I have know idea how they perform that one.
I go accross the street to the train station where it’s cleaner, the walking gets me the exercise is what I tell them.