c(h)ristine (hypothetically) has a “mad shitter” at her workplace, apparently. And yes, it is sad that there is a category of weird people who defecate in workplaces.
Well, I can’t say I’ve ever had a comparable experience to that one, but once, way back around the turn of the century (haha, I can say that now!), I was working at a now-defunct company that made computer-usage tutorials for the blind.
I lived pretty far from work; it ended up being something like 20 minutes by bus, then 45 minutes by subway, or else 20 minutes by train and then 25 minutes by subway — if I could catch the train on time, otherwise I was screwed.
Some mornings, I was screwed no matter what. I’d get to the subway station and someone would have committed a rush hour suicide. You know, the most selfish bastards in the world are those who kill themselves in the morning rush hour. Not only do they end their own lives, but they screw up everyone else’s morning too. I might sound jaded for saying so, but really… how inconsiderate. And it happened a lot, really. Well, I found that it happened a lot during the time when I was working in Montreal, in my part of town.
There wasn’t a suicide on the morning when my boss decided to get a security system, but I was just a little late all the same.
That day, I arrived baffled to find everyone wandering around, half-amused and half-freaked out. My boss asked me when I’d arrived in the neighbourhood, and had I come to work early and then left again?
Of course not. I live across town and if I’ve been here early, I’d have made sure you saw me sitting here when you waltzed walked in at nine-thirty. “Why?” I asked her.
The let the techie kid show me. The techie kid was a guy named Vince, who was a high school graduate, I think, and a skateboard-type of guy. I don’t know if he did skateboard, but he ought to have. It was funny — had he been an Anglo, he’d have sounded less clever, but he was hilarious, always speaking English with a Latinate diction that made him sound brilliant. Most of the time.
Anyway, Vince, he led me around the office, saying. “Some guy, ‘e has a fascination for da porno, you know? ‘E come in ‘ere early in da morning, an’ ‘e connect to juicy-pussy-dot-com five ‘undred times, reload and reload and reload.”
That wasn’t the only thing the guy did. You see, the women in the office, they tended to leave a pair of comfy work shoes at the office. This place was supposed to be a tech company, but you know, the CEO was French, and I don’t mean French-Canadian, I mean she was French and I think she had a thing about, well, “style”. A kind of complex, because she was also, in many ways, French-Canadian.
So the workplace had none of those benefits of the dot.com industry — no dressing casual for work, for example, was the thing that bugged the crap out of me. I’m sitting in a room writing all day. Why do I need to wear dress slacks? Who would be hurt if I wore jeans? I never talk to customers. Customers come here once every three months. What’s the big deal?
Okay, there was plentiful coffee. But I had to dress up for work in an office in front of a PC.
So anyway, because, many of the women left shoes at their desks, it was easy to see which desks belonged to women. The computers on those desks were switched on, and donuts were left on the top of the monitor of each one — some loaded to porn, I think, others just left on — and the women’s shoes were at the wrong desks. Woman A’s shoes were at Woman C’s desk, Woman C’s shoes at Woman B’s, and so on.
The office was locked, with a standard deadbolt key, and the rear exit was always locked — half the time, I ended up checking it, and I always remembered to do so, being a bit obsessive and paranoid about that sort of thing.
Well, they never did figure out who did it, but from then on we had a security system.
I have to say, almost everyone on staff except the CEO thought it was pretty damned funny at the time.