So I started a new contract at Microsoft last week. Basically the first day or two on a Microsoft contract are wasted time because you're still waiting for the necessary accesses and permissions to populate through the systems, even though you had to wait a week after the contract was offered just to get to this point. Besides meaning that it was back to getting up early, back to commuting, back to dealing with silliness like showing up for work and not being able to work because I'm not in the right systems, it also meant going back to using a shared men's room.

Now I'm not a neat freak with OCD issues who can't sit on a toilet someone else has used. Still, I prefer to wait long enough for that toilet to cool down. You know what I mean... when you hit the toilet too soon after someone else has used it and the seat is still warm. Even if you use a seat cover, you can feel the residual warmth. And all I can think is that I'm feeling someone else's ass heat. It's not body heat. It's not 98.6 degrees. It's ass heat, butt BTUs, gluteal glow, tush temperature. It is a lingering leftover from strange parts of strange men, and it just grosses me out. I would rather sit on an ice cold toilet seat than one raidiating another man's ass heat.

Of course, there's time for it to cool while I wipe it down. Toilet seat cover or not, I always grab a clump of TP and make sure to eliminate stray droplets... and stray hairs. I don't know which is worse: the coarse curlies you know to come from the front, or the shorter ones with just a slight curve that are undoubtedly the hair de derriere. What I do know is that I make sure they're gone, gone, gone... no chance of one grabbing hold of my leg and suddenly I've got some other guy's pube hitching a ride on my thigh.

But once I've made it to the safe confines of a toilet seat that is cool enough and clean enough, there's always the sounds... the wet fart, followed by a plop (or worse, a sustained splashing), followed by a moan... or maybe a sigh. And I'm tempted to reach under the stall with a bottle of Immodium... or maybe a cork. And I'm not an innocent. I have subjected others to the fart-plop-sigh and the fart-splash-moan. That doesn't make it any better or easier to listen to as someone's intestines reward him for doing or eating things he shouldn't.

When I leave the bathroom at home, I wash my hands out of habit. But when I leave the men's room, there's more than habit. There's this desire to restore the sense of being clean that warm seats, stray hairs, and the sound of pneumatically assisted pooping have stolen from me. There's a desire to lather away the discomfort and find some happy place that smells of soap and sounds of rushing tap water.

I dry my hands with paper towels and step back out into the unisex hallways, walk briskly toward my desk, and try to forget... try to forget... try to forget.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 21st, 2008 at 10:37 pm and is filed under Just Personal, Stupid Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.