I’ve tried to be good. Really, I have. I’m also not fixated on things scatological, I swear. It’s just that the office bathroom continues to be a rich vein of stories to mine. It’s not like I’m setting any of this up. It just seeks me out and presents itself.

Of course, it doesn’t help that I have all the imagination of a microencephalic toad, so when easy material presents itself, I greedily clutch at it, like a greasy-fingered hobo in a sudden downpour, desperately attempting to catch a wet bottle of Night Train, as it suddenly plunges through the bottom of its sodden, ruptured paper bag. I understand that a lot of creativity occurs when artists are drunk as hobos, or otherwise out of their gourds, behaving in an antisocial and scandalous manner. Maybe I should start hitting the sauce. It would, perchance, lessen my reliance on Weird Tales from the Water Closet (wasn’t that an old EC title?).

I’ll keep them mercifully brief. The first one is that, apparently, some poor sap is running around our office with a set of itchy balls. On three separate occasions, I’ve found open packets of medication sitting atop the urinals in the men’s room. The little packages read, in bold red print, “MAXIMUM STRENGTH HYDROCORTISONE ANTI-ITCH CREAM”. Now, if I’d just seen that the one time, I probably wouldn’t have given it a second thought -bathrooms have all kinds of random detritus in them- but three times? I mean, seriously, if you’re standing in front of the urinal, you’ve got your package in your hand. Why our mystery itchy-balled colleague does not choose to apply this soothing salve in the privacy of a stall, I cannot fathom.

I seriously hope that the first anecdote does not tie directly into the second. I have actually refrained from publicly discussing this previously, but we’ve got a dry-wiper running amok here in the office. That’s right, a fella who doesn’t deign to wash his hands, or even rinse, three out of four times he does his business. Normally, this would be only moderately distasteful, but when we found out, we all suddenly realized that practically the whole floor was in the habit of rummaging through a huge bag of peanut M&Ms that was continually replenished by a generous soul in our department. The same bag that the dry-wiper was in the habit of constantly raiding. It’s one thing to know that somebody has less-than-sanitary habits, but quite another to know that for several weeks, you may have been unwittingly ingesting someone else’s urine, feces, and sweat, not to mention skin flakes from an itchy scrotum. The fact that the quantities involved are minute does little or nothing to assuage one’s disgust, no matter how sanguine one’s outward appearance..

Needless to say, the popularity of the candy, and communal foodstuffs in general, plummeted, once the word got ’round that, however minutely, that there was more than one variety of nuts in the big yellow sack. I don’t eat anything communal that isn’t in a factory-sealed pouch anymore.