|
|
Saturday, December 20, 2003
|
|
TOILET ETIQUETTE AND THE DAMNABLE SECURITY INDUSTRY
Bill at Bloviating Inanities (which is a nice blog. You should read it. Really, you should) recently wrote this post about a notice left in ladies room at is wife's workplace. At first I was going to write extensively about the inanity (go figure) of such a notice...but then the memories started to haunt me. I've not only had to write those notices, I've actually had to have personal conversations with the offenders.
As I've noted here before, up until August 11th of this year, I was a security supervisor. I supervised security guards. As most of you probably know from personal experience, the security industry is staffed by two classes of people: very, very recent immigrants-who have taken a huge professional step down to provide for their families in a new land. The hardest of hard working people- and sub-humans. People one step below serial killers. Most of these idiots don't have the intelligence or the initiative to murder hookers. These are people born and raised here with (an albeit somewhat) passing fluency with the language. These are the last people you should ever want dealing with the public. Yet deal with the public they do. I got to clean up the messes, both figurative and literal.
Before I tell you about the main offenders, I should give you some insight about where I worked. From January of 2001 through August of 2003, I worked in a Big Important Building in downtown Toronto. Said Big Important Building had Big Important Tenants, three of them to be be specific. Most people would recognize their names immediately. And all three had their corporate headquarters where I worked. I actually had to pass a three month long background investigation before I could set foot on any of the floors that one of the Big Important Companies leased. In so far as is possible in that deviant industry, this was the big time.
First, I'll tell you about Bill. Bill was 62 when I first started working with him and seemed to learn nothing about social propiety during his long life. Bill could offend people without a thought in ways that would take even someone as horribly wrong as I am years to and not think twice about it. In fact, Bill would get offended if he learned that he offended someone else. "Offended" is perhaps to light a term. Bill would get indignant! It was a shocking thing to see, really. But I almost never saw it first hand. Bill was actually afraid of me.
When I first started working that building there was an extra coverage guard (read; retard they shlep in to run the freight elevators on weekends) named Jesse. Jesse was a colossal pain in the ass! He thought he knew it all......Christ, he was obnoxious! Well, Jesse went home and, who relieved my partner and I? Bill and his partner. Bill had some experience with Jesse and decided to test my tolerance for him. Apparently, I passed. Whenever Jesse's name was mentioned, I went into a tirade of debilitating diseases that he would be afflicted with "if there were a truly just God."
"Well, I think Jesse...." Bill began
"Should be afflicted with Parkinson's and die a slow horrible death, entombed in his own fucking body?" I finished.
"Nooooo, I think Jesse is...."
"A worthless tumour that should be cut out of my life like the cancer that he is, urinated on and disposed of in the incinerator?"
I make quite the first impression, what can I say?
Bill assumed that I was insane. Therefore, Bill left me alone.
The rest of the staff wasn't so lucky.
There was one kid at the building who had the deep misfortune of having had to be partnered for a time with Bill. Said kid was a hip-hop fan, as kids these days are. Bill recognized the style of his street clothes and observed that he missed the days of slavery. "Blacks liked slavery", Bill opined, "it was good for them."
At one point I went on vacation to California and my partner, a twenty-year-old girl was stuck working with Bill. During the course of a 12-hour midnight shift he decided to learn every intimate detail of her life that he could. "So (insert my partners name here), have you ever had sex? Have you ever had a man drill you really, really hard?" I should point out that Bill is the most effeminate man alive and I can't blame my then partner for wanting a long, hot shower with a Brillo pad to scrub herself clean at the end of the night.
Bill's less than stellar relations with the fairer sex didn't end there. He categorically refused to refused to refer to women as anything other than "bitches", "whores", "sluts" and "cunts". I'm not so much sure he wouldn't do it as much as he was incapable of it.
Yet, inexplicably, Bill's misogyny only seemed to reinforce the rumors of his homosexuality. For this too, Bill had a remedy. This involved changing into his street clothes with the change-room door WIDE open. Have you ever seen a 62-year-old in his undies? I have. Trust me, you'd complain, too. Imagine how the female staff felt.
Eventually, Bill's inability to shut up and get along with humanity bit him on the ass (which he may or may not have enjoyed) and he was removed from the building (but not fired. After all, it's not like he had a blog.) But Bill was a minor irritant. I hadn't been promoted yet and he wasn't my responsibility.
Jon, however, was my responsibility. Jon was hired perhaps 6 months before my promotion and from day one was the Three Mile Island of hygeine nightmares. I trust everyone remembers Pigpen from the "Peanuts" cartoons? Yes? Good. That was Jon, except the lines from Jon's body denoting the smell wasn't a literary device. They were actually THERE! His smell wasn't so much occularly offensive as it was a physical force of it's own. The man was his own Dirty Bomb. Were he hired in these, less peaceful days, I would've had him declared an enemy combatant and been done with him on the spot.
Jon must have, on some base level, been aware of his own offensiveness as during the early part of his tenure he attempted to mask it with colonge. "Colonge" may suggest more than I mean. Jon's colonge smelled more of a combination of toothpaste, mouthwash, rubbing alcohol and toilet water.....unflushed toilet water. It was one of those rare cases, like chemotherapy, where the cure was almost as bad as the disease. The combination of the colonge and his au natural scent made Jon smell like a unique combinination of a wildebeast in heat, diminshed expectations and defeat. And Jon was as clumsy as he was smelly. He insisted on breaking his colonge bottle in our office. Repeatedly. In short order our boss banned him from brining it in the building.
Some time later, when Jon had gotten particularly putrid, he explained to one of the staff that his cat had miscarried it's kittens in the tub, where he kept his uniform and he could, therefore, not shower. This raised more questions in my mind than it answered. These questions included; "Why didn't you get the cat of the tub and to a fucking vet?"; "Why didn't you rinse out the tub and take a shower anyway?" and last, but not least, "Who the fuck keeps a blazer, slacks, a dress shirt and a tie in the fucking tub anyhow?" Forunately, I was too busy being sick to my stomach to ask those questions at the time. I'm sure the answers would've driven me to suicide out of sheer frustration.
Jon's potty skills left much to be desired as well. When I worked midnights, I often relieved Jon on the evening shift. As much as I like to claim super-human bladder control, I can't. At some point in an 8 (or 12 hour shift), I'd have to take a piss. So I'd go to the bathroom and find the toilet seat stained yellow. I don't mean in spots, I mean SOLID FUCKING YELLOW! To this day, I'm not sure if I could cover the seat so totally if I aimed. I tried to ignore it as much as I could (unlike my female partner who would've had to sit in the toxic fucking waste) until the end of my shift when I realized that if it didn't get cleaned up, the day shift (including my boss) would think that I had pissed all over the bathroom.
So......I got to clean up Jon's piss. Repeatedly. Go me.
The best part was that Jon USED to be a supervisor too. He used this as an excuse to give me friendly reminders of how to my job. Now, imagine if you will, taking a job that you really didn't want to help out a boss you think is a cool guy. Now imagine that one of your subordinates looks like he was kicked out of the Grateful Dead for being "a filthy hippie." And he's telling YOU how to do your job.
I got to clean the piss of a 47 year old man off the toilet seat.
Starting to understand why I'm such an angry bastard?
|
|
|
| |
