Monday, May 18, 2009

Awesome Things

I work on the fifth floor of a five story building. I would like to say that I gravitate towards walking the stairs and all things health conscious but that would be bending the truth. And by that I mean lying. The elevator is my friend. Especially considering I have to park across the street and the width of a track away from my building. That said, this morning I was walking into the building behind a group of four or five people all carrying various loads and at the crucial stair/elevator fork in the hall, veering for the stairs. Watching them I think, if they are taking the stairs, you should be too. You aren't even carrying folders or diet coke fridge packs. So up I go, the limp gazelle trailing the herd. After the first flight, every single one of them exit the stairwell. Yeah. They work on floor 2 and I have three floors to go. Awesome.

Although our floor has an 8 to 1 ratio of girls to boys, the architect saw fit to give us attic crawling females a single stall bathroom to fight over. The downside is that anytime the urge is, well, urgent, the bathroom is occupied without fail. It becomes a sort of science actually. One floor below, they have the normal 4 stall bathroom, but it is never your first call to take the stairs. It is a balancing act of how badly you need to go vs how far your office is from the bathroom (the "I've come to far..."). Today I had it worked out where it seemed most favorable to wait it out instead of trek downstairs. I was hovering around the break room, trying to make it less obvious that I was waiting for the bathroom to vacate. Standing there, looking ever so nonchalantly at the wall, the minutes ticking, I hear the flush. Then I hear another flush. 30 seconds. Flush number three. Not a good sign. Multiple flushes either mean floater or skid marks. Either way the 4th floor all of a sudden seemed like a good idea. The flushing sound that saves us from entering to someone else's smell and leaving to others thinking it is our own. Awesome.

Wandering back into the break room, I was going for a couple waters to get me through the morning stretch. I noticed that they now have new Gatorade powder packets that proclaim on the front "Low Calorie Electrolytes". I immediately think of Idiocracy and "but it has electrolytes..." and start laughing. I can barely try to explain through the laughs and I feel certain that I am losing them on "Okay, so everyone in the future is an idiot...". Finding something that makes you laugh...hard...and not having a single fellow connoisseur of 2006 B movies on the entire floor. Potentially awkward. Laughing harder every time you try to explain why it is funny. Awesome.

I got back from vacation to find that a document I, along with others, had proofed had a phone number altered and when changed, two of the numbers transposed. An easy thing to miss, indeed. Our minds often see what they know should be there. I write "an" but when reading it back, my mind reads "and" because it knows that is what it was meant to be. So, when the document was received, instead of a company number, people were given the number for an adult entertainment line. Sudden onset OCD for triple checking phone numbers. Awesome.

1 comment:

Bernie said...

That's still better than walking outside to the privvy.
A courtesy flush was not available in those.

Love to all,

GMANPOP