Bowel movement death trap Monday.

Our floor at work has a Hispanic man that serves as our bathroom janitor. That poor, poor man.

Yesterday. The return of the work force. I’ve worked in mostly super mega corporate environments. Every year around the 2nd or 3rd week of December, everyone magically vanishes. Vacation time or not.

Roads clear, driving to work in the morning is almost a pleasure.

You can hear yourself think at your own desk.

I no longer have to eat lunch at 10:45. The line at the salad place is even shorter. Fuck yes, salads are exciting.

Anyway.

Everyone magically vanishes, but not their shit.

The Monday after a holiday break…almost of any length… is a complete nightmare for support staff of any kind. But the bathrooms. I was dreading it coming in today. I knew by the abundance of SALT LIFE or SALT LYFE stickers on cars I passed that morning I’d have to put up with someone’s awful, awful compounded holiday shit.

The janitor does his detail around 7:45 each morning, replace TP, wipe the counters, it’s an in and out job. But not on bowel movement death trap Monday, no sir. He just stands outside waiting. That’s an indicator that I’m not going to fix my hair for at least another 15 minutes.

I’m not really sure how it happens, how these people let it get so bad. They’re in there huffing and puffing like crazy and I can’t deal with that.

It gets worse. These damn bastards fucking love BIGGEST LOSER interoffice competitions complete with hundreds of dollars in the winner pot. Simply translated, biggest shitter. Some take supplements to help them fire one to 7 shits a day. Unacceptable.

These vitamin fueled blowouts often result in the shit shaming of my favorite stall. The large roomy stall. The one where I can pull the toilet paper down without performing cirque du soleil acts. I don’t know if it’s how I was raised, but if you shit all over something….generally you at least make an attempt to clean it up? If you leave poop all over the back of the toilet seat, or some sort of shit spray in the toilet…you wipe or flush a few times? Hell no, not in super mega corporate land.

Some of them pick their favorite time of day to warm up the bathroom. Mine is around 2:40 PM. The janitor makes another round, and cleans just before. I know a lot of the building support staff, they’re good hard working people. I get good intel.

Anyways.

I worked with one guy who everyday no matter what would shit up the woman’s bathroom at 8:50. He got to work at 8:30, then like clockwork go destroy the women’s room. The women in the office hated it. Now these were single person bathrooms, so maybe if someone was desperate and couldn’t wait….sure but not this dude, not every damn day…that’s fucked up, stop eating fucking Bo-jangles.

I know why he did it though, I’ll give him that.

The men’s toilet in this place was horrendous. It also had a window with blinds that didn’t really hug the window well, in a fairly creepy spot. Ants. Fucking Ants. This building had piles of red ants in this specific bathroom, they came in through the window. The toilet seat itself was actually melted and abrasive in the front where your pee pee is supposed to hang out, and the rest of the seat just appeared to have been chewed on by a large dog. Gouges like you’d see on a cutting board in a kitchen.

If you had to use this thing, this throne of filth, you’d be facing one of those accordion closet doors. Inside the closet was all the IT networking gizmo’s for the building. So pretty much, you’re staring at red blinky flashy lights and things. I wonder how many people opened it up thinking there was a camera back there.

Sure I get why he didn’t like that room. It was cold, people could see you from outside in partial shitting view, it was full of ants, the toilet seat would give you cuts or stab you, and it felt like you were being taped.

Regardless, I didn’t like the guy. I had figured out his routine. At 8:45 that Monday morning, I removed everything in the women’s room that could even be thought of as improvised toilet paper. That morning I also learned that the women’s room had baby wipes, aloe toilet paper, hand lotion, candles, and a wicker basket with Sudoku books and actual full books in it. At 8:48, shortly after dismantling the women’s room of wipe-able materials, I do the same to the men’s room.

(Men’s room had single ply and cardboard for paper towels….WTF)

I quickly stash all this shit in the cube across from both bathrooms. Later I regretted this because that cube was always full of water because the toilet upstairs in a separate business office leaked through the ceiling…oh I don’t know…all day everyday…a lot of stuff got wet. Oh well.

8:50. This dude makes a break for the bathroom.

At 9 AM give or take a few minutes this guy yells in the bathroom. “Ah damn what the hell”.

His NJ accent and shittery echo down the hall.

Unexpectedly, he emerges from the bathroom. Pants not even all the way up, wiggles himself into the adjacent men’s room.

Hmm ok weird. This guy is dedicated to wiping I suppose.

Not even 10 seconds later. “What the fuck is going on in this place”.

He actually left the office after that. I’m not sure what all happened. And I’m not sure if I’m a dick. But this man did fowl things in the restroom, men or women’s, justice needed to be served.

I replaced all the wipey goods.

He came back later in the morning. He seemed irritated.

Well…Anyways…

Narnia.

Fucking work. Minor details about making out with corporate…and the opposite sex in small spaces.  

Fairly simple concept.

Work is boring. Fucking isn’t. I’ll keep expanding on this because it’s a rabbit hole of a tale, but for now I’ll just leave this here…

Anyone left in the office past 5 is typically a mindless drone, and if they aren’t or it’s before quitting time, there’s always a good racy text or MMS to fire a neuron or 7. So many options. Cars in park, or cars at the park. Office building stairwells never have cameras. Parking decks only have cameras in the stairwells or near them. Guards are doing it too, or mostly they enjoy the show more than the shits they’re supposed to give. Service elevators have cameras, but their lobbies don’t. Elevators are a great grind, too quick, but they’ll really set the stage for a coffee break later in the day, crawling under desks. Stockrooms are small, and a fantastic alternative to trying to hide a credit card charge on a hotel room. If you need to hide that sort of thing. Coffee really grew on me. I love coffee now. I didn’t always.

But it happened.

Well…Anyways…

…I fucking love coffee now.

My boss put her tits on my head. All the time. One boss shit himself in front of me. It gets a little better, don’t worry.

Well…Anyways…

I’ve had soooo many jobs. I’ve worked since I was about 13, definitely remember working at 14. I’ve done almost every job I can think of. My father worked at a staffing agency. Got me exposed to all kinds of industries/environments. One of the best choices I’ve ever made. Really.

Kind of in this order…

  • Circus
  • Ran printing presses
  • Mailroom gigs
  • Annoying putter flyers on your car guy
  • Food service functions; Cash register asshole, Serving, host, valet, dishes, food prep…
  • Physical labor stuffs; Warehouse work, forklift operator, inventory jockey, mover, truck helper…
  • Retail; Big box store stuffs…Sales, Hardware tech, shelf stocking jockey
  • Corporate; IT stuffs… He ( ll ) lpdesk, networking blah blah blah, developer, systems admin, technical project manager ( / bullshit artist)

I know I missed some…I’ve had a metric fuck ton of jobs, and with them…Bosses.

Each one was fairly entertaining. And by entertaining I mean I can’t believe that sometimes these people lead other people that get paid money to do a task.

I guess it started with the circus. My boss there was either naked, doing cocaine, or swinging from something, anytime I can remember. Seems about right. Just sub in really nice orchestra type music for the motley crue you’re imagining. Cirque du soleil. What a blast. I had a single lucid conversation with my onsite boss. I received my orders/duties. I opened and closed a door every 1.5 hours. 12 dollars an hour…Awesome. I was 18 ish.

It wasn’t so bad. None have my jobs have been that bad.

Well…Anyways…

Fast forward to some corporate gigs. This is where the magic happened. The really mind blowing shit that I knew would make me happy I’d laid down roots in the “concrete jungle”. These bosses are the thing of legend. Thinking back about these folks always makes me cringe through a smile. It’s a good thing….or something.

I had this boss that had the largest collection of shoulder padded jackets and shirts in the southeast. Burlington coat factory depended on this lady. Hell of a person. Great lady. Thanks to her I had the opportunity to learn the basis of everything I know in IT.

…Said on occasion…daily, hilarious shit. Like umm, “I want to watch you grow”, “I’m going to grow you”. Ah normally this’d be totally cool. But not when, well, like when I’m sitting down and she’d bend over behind me and her tits would rest on my head or neck. I love tits. But not when I’m not ready for them. Ah maybe sometimes when I’m not ready for them, that’s fun too. I wasn’t ready for a few things that happened. Being yelled at for being at work on a Tuesday because she thought it was Sunday. Drugs? The world will never know.

Same company, different boss. Guy was hilarious. I look up to him in ways. Because of this guy I travelled the entire country by plane, a few times…almost every state. Drove through most of the country due to his wacky ass plans too. An experience, I appreciate daily. This was by far the most homophobic person I’ve ever met. Visibly uncomfortable in the presence of homosexual men, I took so much joy out of watching a male flight attendant having fun with that phobia on a SFO – CLT flight. He’d yell, all the time. Fuck, mostly retard though. Once in Maryland while installing some equipment, on a ladder 25 feet in the air, I was behind him. Handing up equipment. That morning we ate at Maryland’s finest Bob Evans. I had pancakes. He of course had to get crazy and order some bullshit run for the border omelet scramble.

So he shits himself, loudly. On the ladder. With me behind him. Abruptly stating “Oh no”. He left.

My next boss, to avoid getting my ass kicked…was just simply amazing. I really found him to be one of the best bosses I’ve ever had. It was with him that I learned to cuss out, or just cuss at my boss. I also learned what a “come to jesus meeting” was. He and I honestly had a great relationship. He parties hard. I can’t keep up with that dude. He didn’t give a shit about how much shit I got in to with women around the office….I should get that in to words someday.

Anyways… For my own safety, maybe his too, I’ll leave out most of the details.

Another boss of mine lived on red bull, smoked electronic cigarettes and normal ones…all day, got excited over new leaked porn, spoke frequently of skanky crack whores, called everything “guy”, and ate more bojangles than I thought was humanly possible. Seems tame in comparison to most bosses I’ve had. My day to day with this dude was mostly me cussing him out for never explaining anything to me, and trying to decide if the girl upstairs wanted to bang him or not. She did only talk to him…

After that there was a weird lull, I never even met this boss. And only talked to him when I was on furlough. Maybe a total of 4 times over 1.5 years. We still email back and forth over the holidays to say hello.

And now, currently. This guy comes off caring or compassionate or whatever. He’s good at what he does, and what his team is supposed to be doing.

Then….He’ll be talking to you, and mid-sentence close a door in your face. Or walk off. It happens so much we coined a phrase using his last name. You just got “::insert last name::-ed”. Guy often tells you how to do your job by telling you to do things he can’t actually explain or find a process on how to do. I think that’s normal in the corporate world though. I think one of my favorite things is the phone calls before and after a shift that are obvious fishing calls to see where you are because he’s never in the office.

“Hey are you in the office”….Nope its 5:05 and I leave at 4:30, why what’s up?

“Oh I didn’t have anything”…What?

“Yeah have a good night”…..

“What…?”

Or the popular, “Hey you’re working tomorrow, but there’s not much going on so just take the day”. This was every Friday for about 3 months. It was fantastic. I’m hourly though. Oh well.

Then there was the latest conversation.

Me – “I can’t say I want to remain in the role I’m in past my contract end date (6 weeks out), I’d like to limit my travel and work in a hands-on IT role”

“Hey, I blah blah blah…We’re looking for a different role, so we won’t be renewing your contract again anyway.”

Me – “can you describe that role?”

“Blah blah”

Me –“That sounds an awful lot like what I do now”

“It is, it’s pretty much what you do now”

Me – “….?”

Well…Anyways…

The most ridiculous part is, I’ve ended up respecting these people.

Having a boss is the most entertaining thing I’ve ever experienced. I’m grateful to have been confused so many different times. In so many different ways. Also…I’m job hunting again. The difference….I’m happy to be this time, and excited to get back to something I’m good at.