| Lest one think it presumptuous that a mere janitor should see his life in such mythological proportions as to compare himself to the tragic greek figure, Sisyphus, I think it important to note that the term �janitor�, itself, is derived from the name Janus...the god of doors and corridors. (In a related note, most of us janitors are, in fact, two-faced...but, if my coworkers ask, you didn�t hear it from me.) Please, allow me to tell you my story involving a 30 gallon bag of urine and then try and tell me it is not worthy to be included within the heady, rarified canon along side the tale of Sisyphus. Beede hall, that�s my beat. I�m a janitor. I arrived, one summer morn, promptly at 6:00 A.M., only to discover a �wet floor� sign standing awash in a few inches of urine covering the floor of first Beede�s men�s room. One of the urinals is filled to the brim (yep, you guessed it...with urine.) This summer, the floor has been the home of various artists taking seminars to study their craft, so my first insight is that this must be an installation of some type. However, upon closer scrutiny, I was unable to find any crucifixes. So i had no choice but to consider that it, in fact, wasn't Art, but rather something for me to attend to in my professional capacity. I�ve been in this biz long enough to know that the first crucial step in a situation like this, is to warn people not to continue to urinate in an obviously plugged urinal. (Yes, I know that all involved are attending a university and you would think they would be smart enough not to continue filling an already full urinal. The only way I can continue to have any faith in our education system is to assume they are studying the surface tension of urine.) So I place a 55gallon garbage bag over the entire urinal to let students know that something is amiss. I then go make a call. Now the school�s plumbers don�t arrive for two more hours, but I phone the campus security, thinking they will perhaps call them in early for an emergency. When I describe my predicament, they ask if the �wet floor� sign is still there. I guess someone had called in a complaint about this development at 2:00 in the morning and their �solution� was to come over and put up a �wet floor� sign. �It has not washed downstream, if that�s what you mean,� I rejoin and return to the restroom to take a wet vac to the pool of piss. I soon have the floor dry and am ready to mop it with disinfectant when I hear what sounds like a waterfall or a soothing spring rain. In actuality, it was the urinal overflowing into the 55 gallon bag I had placed over it. It seems that if anyone on the three floors above, were to flush the urinals or shower (average shower=approx. 10 gallons of water) it would drain out of that particular urinal. Since the overflow was being contained (for the time being) by the garbage bag, I could safely go back to phone campus security and implore them to bring the plumbers in. Well, they tell me that since the plumbers will be coming within a half an hour, and this job will be their first priority, to just hang in there. Fine. When I get back to the restroom, the bag is a little over half full (approximately 30 gallons) and still, appropriately enough, �hanging in there.� But I decide to take the bag off and put it in a trashcan before it got so full that it�s too heavy to lift. Here�s something funny about urine, approximately 30 gallons of the stuff, even when diluted by water from the showers, is still amazingly heavy. I can�t possibly lift it into the awaiting trashcan. It is all I can do to drag it over to a shower stall to dump it down it�s drain. I fling the top of the bag o� urine into the shower stall and watch as the tsunami wave o� pee crests near the top of the second tile on the shower wall (approx. 6-8 inches) and then slowly (yet paradoxically, too quickly) begins to ebb back to its source (i.e. ME!) |
| The Tale of 'Piss-yphus' by a. fish |