So, today we had a crazy lady come to the office.
No, not me…
We don’t often get visitors. For one, the majority of our customers are in the states or overseas or some such thing. Very few actually IN Vancouver. Also, we do everything online. For that reason, the doors to our offices are kept locked.
In our building, the bathroom doors are also locked. No big deal — we have keys attached to old broken mice that we just grab when we need to use the facilities.
We also have two separate doors to the office, since this office used to be two that we’ve combined into one by tearing down a wall. This splits the office up into two “sides”. One is the development area, where the programmers and sundry work, and the other side is the “support” area, aka, where my desk is. On my side is also the door to the kitchen area, which contains a kitchen (who knew?) as well as a loungey area with a TV, tables, etc. That’s where the poker magic happens, for example. There’s a door in this room as well, but it’s generally only used when we’re having our poker games. Otherwise, it stays closed & locked and we use the main door.
So, we were a bit surprised when a very loud knock comes to that door while we were playing some poker at lunch today. Oookay. So Theo goes over and opens it, and there’s a woman standing there demanding we let her into the bathroom. Er… what? The bathroom! The BATHROOM! QUICKLY! She’s making it very obvious that we need to let her into the bathroom RIGHT NOW. “I’m already going a little!” Uh…
So, Theo goes off to get the key to the womens room, while the rest of us look at each other in a bit of shock. What the hell? She says, “Hurry up, or I’m going to make a mess for your janitor to clean up!”
She continues to rant and rave about how it SAYS it’s a washroom, and WHY CAN’T SHE GET IN? Because this is our fault, right? Theo returns, explaining that he had to get the key (MUCH nicer than I would have. I don’t take well to demands.) and lets her into the womens bathroom (NOT giving her the key, because what with all the crazy, we might never see it again.) He also mentions to her that it’s not a public bathroom, which isn’t met with much logic.
He comes back into the office, and we all burst out laughing. I assume she did her business and left, but what the freaking hell? Is that standard operating procedure? You have to pee, so you find some random office and make belligerent demands on innocent bystanders? Well, I suppose we WERE between her and her peeing, but still.
Later, I was going to make a run to the bathroom. I took one step inside, and it reeked of urine. I wisely chose to go to the bathroom upstairs instead.
And you know, I feel sympathy for people who perhaps need to pee, and there’s nowhere handy to pee. And I’ve actually used the office building routine before — it’s about 50/50 as to whether they’ll be locked, and it’s not hard to just blend in. Hotels are reasonably good for this, too. And this neighbourhood isn’t exactly pee-friendly. There are a bunch of restaurants, but they’re very specifically for paying customers only. We’re only a few blocks from a major transit hub, so you’d think there’d be somewhere you can pee that isn’t also where you haul the garbage to, but there really isn’t. (I recommend avoiding the alleys.)
But you know, if you really need to pee and there’s nowhere to do so, perhaps not YELLING at the person who’s going out of their way to help you might be good?
I know, she probably has a severe case of the crazy, and I feel sympathy for that. But the sympathy lessens when it’s me, or people I like being yelled at. About the peeing. The PEEING!
Seriously, what the hell?
It’s at times like this that I like to think back on something I heard in my youth.
“Huh.”