Shit happens

I'm gonna talk dirty for a minute, and not in a good way, so read on at your own risk. I'm so disgusted I have to rant about it.

When most people get the urge to visit an animal habitat, they go to a zoo, or on a safari, or to prison. I have to travel no more than 30 feet from my desk. The sign on the door reads "Men," but it should really be changed to "Chimpanzees." The inside of the restroom looks like an ad for "Monkeys Gone Wild."

Monkeys fling their own feces when they're bored. Humans fling the feces of other animals (for instance, cow chips) when they're bored. In this bathroom it's hard to tell who's flinging and why.

The first sign of trouble is the eye-watering "aroma" upon entering. Do these people eat bat guano? The stench is so bad I'm tempted to wear scuba gear when I go in. It makes a New Jersey industrial park smell like an English garden.

There are four stalls and two urinals. The urinals are so close to one another that two guys standing side by side are virtually having sex. Really, that sort of behavior should be reserved for public restrooms. The stalls are appropriately named--all they lack are the horses. Worse is when you take a lady-or-tiger gamble and open the door to a stall and behold the unflushed receptacle. Toilet seat covers sit on the lids. Giant wads of bathroom stationery sit in the bowl. And I can't even talk about what else is in there. It's like these guys were absent when their parents toilet trained them. Fear Factor contestants wouldn't last more than 10 seconds there.

Then there's the graffiti, which, surprisingly, is sparse. There are no phone numbers or gay jokes. The few nuggets that are there are priceless. There's the illiterate and pathetic "Suh my dih you smelly ho" and the now irrelevant "Y2K." And then there's the scrawling I finally couldn't stand any longer and had to doctor, Bathroom goers must now scratch their heads over why someone would have taken the trouble to etch "I love Debussy" into the wall. I was originally going to change it to "I love Josie and the Pussycats," but that was too long.



Early in the morning the bathroom is clean and fresh again, waiting for new visitors to defile it. It's not as if the building's cleaning staff is to blame; it's the average library patron. There's another men's room on the other side of the building that always seems clean. Turns out it's not used quite as frequently as ours. I will go the extra mile to that bathroom, because when you gotta go, you gotta go.