The bathroom at work, for the next three weeks, is on the
54th floor.
Coinciding with this is the introduction of an espresso
machine, mere yards from my desk, on the 53rd.
To further layer these events, the bathroom on 54
requires a security badge, both to get in and out of the room.
You see, we here at Acme Gravel and Grommets take our
security very seriously. Sure, you claim
to be yourself on the way in to the bathroom, but can you say the same on the
way out?
Can you?
Can you prove it?
The cries of those who get in on the tails of others and
are now stranded, card-less, are piteous.
I consider all of this from my desk, late Thursday
morning. Tweaked on espresso, I
simultaneously compose an e-mail, take a soapy toothbrush to some of the last
file folders on the planet, and, wide-eyed and twitchy, plan my next trip to
the bathroom.
There’s something about having to walk down a flight of
stairs and then further in to the bowels, as it were, of another floor for
something so simple as relieving one’s self that makes one pause.
Wait too long – as all American office workers do – and you
may find yourself doing an interesting and potentially undignified dance.
We take for granted the little things, don’t we? Heating.
Tarred roads. Rooves and/or roofs. Plumbing.
I check the ceilings for cameras. In a world of self-locking bathrooms, perhaps
the simultaneous arrival of both the updating of the bathrooms and the espresso
machine are a test of some sort. But of
what? Project management? Spatial awareness? Bladder control?
Shaking a clenched fist at the ceiling, I vow to endure
this latest first-world problem. Like
one-ply toilet paper and lotion that smells like lavender, not the geranium I
prefer, a bathroom one floor down is really nothing.
Still. I shall
shake my fist.
And like my pioneering foremothers, I shall rise to the
occasion.