The Bathroom Librarian

File under “WTF”:

Someone in my office keeps taking reading material into the bathroom. I suspect it is the same someone who thought that it was a good idea to affix a wall pocket to the side of the stall in the first place (making it what I now call the stall pocket).

I don’t object to bathroom reading material in general – as a matter of fact, the last several issues of Entertainment Weekly have gone straight to the magazine rack in the bathroom, because if I don’t skim through it in there, I’ll forget I even subscribe to the damn thing. There’s a pile of magazines on my bedroom floor that haven’t been touched because I’ve been so busy lately. So yeah, bathroom reading material at home is mostly okay.

But there’s a time and place for bathroom reading, I think, and my office is neither.

This has been going on for quite some time, and for months I paid no attention to it. But finally I started to get sick of seeing it there every time I went to the bathroom (and I go to the bathroom like twelve times a day), so one day when the suspect had already left for the day, I decided to throw all the reading material into the trash can.

Except that I made the mistake of throwing it into the trash can right there in the bathroom, and housekeeping doesn’t visit our office more than once a week unless we call and suggest that the overflowing garbage might attract rodents. Then they come.

So. Housekeeping didn’t come that night, and the next day when I made my first of twelve bathroom visits, I noticed something odd.

The reading material had found its way back to the stall pocket.

So I threw it away again.

Next day? Same thing. The reading material was back in the stall pocket.

It happened for at least three days. I felt like I was living in Groundhog Day or something.

Finally, one night when I was working late, I stole all the reading material, shoved it in the bottom of one of my office trash cans, and called housekeeping to come pick up the trash the very next morning.

Problem solved. Or so I thought.

Because when the fall brochures and fine arts schedules and stuff started getting delivered to my office, our bathroom librarian helpfully placed a seasonal array right back there in the stall pocket.

And this time, it freaks me out even more because one of the brochures has a picture of the president and his wife on the front, and their smiling faces are exactly at the same height as my ass when I’m sitting down.

So I feel like they’re staring at me and I get performance anxiety and then I have to turn them around before I can, you know, go. And now every time I go in there, the very first thing I do is turn that brochure to the wall so I don’t see them looking at me.

But someone keeps turning them so they face the front and it’s FREAKING ME OUT.

I do not, however, think that the bathroom librarian is the same person who has been folding hotel points on our toilet paper rolls.

11 Replies to “The Bathroom Librarian”

  1. That is so… weird. Bathroom reading material is totally okay – at HOME. Who wants to put their hands on a magazine that somebody else has touched while they were sitting on the pot? Not I. That is so bizarre.

  2. she put the mag rack low enough so the top of the mag is level with the top of the bowl? What, are you all that short there? I don't understand about the “eww” thing though. Girls go to the bathroom together, talk to each other over what I assume is the noise they ignore they're making and then the come out of the stall, and often enough (I'm guessing) go straight to the mirror to share make-up, etc. (or whatever) before they get around to washing their hands. Now, I'm not saying I know, I've only witnessed this when I was invited inside – but, I mean, girls deal with SO much more that's “gross” than guys will ever have to and yet they're so “eww” all the time. I know there's some disconnect somewhere. Sorry, back to what you were saying – oh, yeah – smiling photos. K, just take in your own reading contribution and make sure the mag is BIG and has no eyes on the cover. …and then just never touch it again.

  3. te only reason i am reading the first “wheel of time” book is that it fits in my pocket when i go to the bathroom at work.

  4. Seriously, where do these people come from and why do we have to work with them? You have a coworker who flosses her teeth at her desk? That is so disgusting!

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