Friday, June 17, 2011

ALERT: Turd on the Loose

Just received the following email: "Inconceivable crime scene, handi stall on 4."

I grabbed my reporter's notebook and headed in.

It appears that a turd crawled out of the penthouse bowl (leaving half of its body wedged under seat, it's "legs" dangling off the edge of the bowl) then dropped to the floor, scooted across the tile into the Peter Brady stall, shimmied up the edge of that bowl and then dropped itself into the neighboring toilet.

* THIS IS A DEVELOPING STORY

Wednesday, June 8, 2011

A very particular brand of hygiene

First floor men’s room is a hit-or-miss proposition. Steps from the lobby, it’s usually in pretty good shape since it has that “we want to make a good impression on our guests” thing going for it.

But it’s also the bathroom of choice for nervous-tummy job applicants. And the pre-interview deuce is not a friendly deuce.

Yesterday, the first floor penthouse stall provided a strange glimpse at one person’s particular brand of hygiene—a single paper towel left on the seat.

What sort of OCD makes a person say, “I can’t make a poopie unless there is a thin barrier of paper towel between my left buttock and the toilet seat”?

Thursday, June 2, 2011

The fourth floor makes a statement

The poopers on four are not going down without a fight.

It’s almost as if somebody read our last blog entry about third floor and E-level vying for the title of “most vile” and decided that fourth floor, as the namesake of this blog, needed to get back into the mix.

Yesterday, they did so in a big way.

It started when a co-worker appeared at my office door, his face ashen and his voice shaky.

“Have you seen it?”

“Seen what?” I asked.

“Fourth floor. Penthouse stall. I can’t...”

His voice trailed off. He shook his head and shuffled away. He looked broken.

I grabbed my reporter’s notebook and headed in.

When I opened the door, there was an eerie silence. I was surprised not to walk into a wall of smell. Usually, when a tipster alerts me to a “must see” crime scene, you can pretty much tell what you’re going to see as soon as you open the door. But this was something else. Something more...mysterious.

I walked slowly toward the penthouse stall, my footsteps echoing in the empty(?) men’s room. The door to the stall was almost closed, but I could tell that it was not latched. I tapped it gently with my foot and it creaked open.

“What the hell happened here?”

The toilet was gagged with toilet seat covers—a bouquet of 20 or more, shoved in to the toilet as if to hold back the fires of hell. This was not neat work. The paper was crumpled and matted and showed signs of panic.

Strewn about the floor were another dozen toilet seat covers. Fallen solders. Some pristine and others mangled.

In the corner, a clutch of ten covers, huddled together. Almost as if they’d crawled into the corner to stay warm before expiring in a heap of dead tissue.

And the toilet seat cover holder? Still one or two sticking out of the cardboard, but the edges were jagged and torn. Like a pulpy flesh stump, fresh from an emergency amputation.

My eye went down to the toilet paper rolls. Surely this carnage was an act of desperation--a man who found himself without any other option and called upon the toilet seat covers as a last line of defense. But no...two relatively full rolls of toilet paper sat there, untouched. Mocking.

I stepped closer to the bowl and quickly realized that down at the roots of this tissue butt-plug was a dark and unhealthy chocolate brew. I backed away.

What kind of madness posses a man in his dark hour of need? Yesterday, we got our answer.