Terror, Innuendo, and Body Functions

Be still my friends, and listen to a tale so hair raising it will give you split ends.

I work in an office. To most eyes, there's nothing unusual about it. Nothing that would freeze your blood in your veins, or cause you to pack clean underpants in your brief case every morning. Just any office. A small office. 10 people typing, filing, writing, editing, designing. But in this office lurks a cast of characters even Ricky Gervais couldn't dream up. 

The owner: a small, wisp of a woman with dyed black hair and a voice the tone and pitch of a cat in heat running around the office on sky high-heels screaming obscenities at the minions, "Are you fucking stupid? A baby could do that?!!" I call her Cruella.

The lead designer: a tall, deep voiced, lazy-eyed book designer who is the constant brunt of the owner's screeching wrath, and who regularly makes wide, graphic, and detailed sexual statements without realizing what he's saying, "Hey Young Female Assistant, I have a big sausage. Do you want some?" Let's call Lead Designer, Lead Designer.

The manager: a 35 year old married woman with no children who holidays every year for two weeks with her 35 year old childless husband in Disneyland. Add to this a chronic habit of lying, exaggeration, and wearing a Tinkerbell hoodie to the office, and you begin to draw her likeness, "My husband is strong. He's really strong. He's stronger than anyone I know. He's the strongest man in the world." 

And, "I have a mortal fear of sharks. I'm terrified of them. I'm so scared of sharks I have to shower with my eyes closed." Affectionately crowned, Tink.

Long suffering minion #1: a 40 year old, unmarried, child-free, unattached, in fact, never-attached, miserable lump of womanhood. She is so threatened that someone wants her job, or that she's going to be replaced, that she won't talk to anyone in the office unless she can bark orders at them, (save the accountant, to whom she only speaks in baby-talk). All other communications consist of grunts: "Good morning LSM #1., how was your weekend?" She replies, with out raising her eyes from her work, "Uuggghh." She is also a claustrophobic. I have dubbed her, Grunty.

Long suffering minion #2: Our expeditor. So cowed that his duties include filling and shipping orders, and picking up dog shit. Did I neglect to mention that Cruella brings in her big golden lab to work every day? LSM #2's job includes the dog. He walks it, feeds it, waters it, and cleans up after it. In fact, when the said decrepit, ancient dog shit on the floor one day--in the office, you understand--and a kind hearted employee picked it up, Cruella lost her mind and started screaming, "Who cleaned it up??!! WHO CLEANED IT UP???!!!!! Why? Why did you do that? Is that your job? IS IT???!!! That's LSM #2's job!!!" Obviously, he'll be called Roger.

Young Female Assistant: an attractive, intelligent 25 year old who's so shy she nearly melts in to the walls. She is the devoted acolyte of Lead Designer, and does all the dirty work (close cropping fluffy kitties 5 days a week), while being coached, by said Lead Designer, on how to dress and the right way of meeting men. And finally, you'll recognize young female designer by the pseudonym, Young Female Designer.

Cast of characters intact, now the real story begins. I can't, for your own safety, reveal all the face-melting anecdotes at once, but I will, from time to time, parcel them out at what I feel meets toxic safety levels. 

That said, here it the tale of Toilet Trouble.

8:30 a.m. I arrive at work, chipper, whistling a happy tune, and looking especially good, thankyouverymuch. It has been a delightful week.  Cruella and Tink are away on business. The office is quiet and laughter sometimes punctuates the air. Our days of cowering in fear of being given some mad tongue-lashing because Cruella burnt her toast (more to come on that story, so sit tight), or being cornered in the kitchen and regaled with stories of how awesome the High School Musical production number was at Disneyland last year, were over for the week. But fate had other plans for me and the office. As I walked through the door, Lead Designer, Grunty, and Roger are running around looking horrified. A unique scent permeates the air. It takes only moments for me to isolate this particular smell. Shit. No, not shit, this smells bad, but shit. Literal shit.  

Grunty, who's done her level best to be in before every one else this week (more than likely to act as class monitor while the teacher is away) had to relieve herself. She entered one of our two bathrooms, which are like the typical household bathrooms, no stalls, just a room with a toilet and a sink, and had a great big poop. Well she did what any right thinking pooper does, she flushed. On this particular morning though, the flush backfired. The toilet and all its contents gushed on to the floor. Grunty came flying out screaming, "It's flooding, it's flooding!" As she came out the open door, so did everything else.

Roger, use now to being poop-picker, waded into the bathroom and wedged something under the float in the tank to stop the excessive, every growing poo river. My coffee and Tim Bits weren't looking quiet as appealing to me any more. With deep shame, and an apparent fear of her own feces, Grunty retreated to her desk, on the other side of the office, and left the extensive clean up to Roger. It wasn't pretty. I will spare the gory details. Suffice to say, yuck-poo!

Well, good ole Roge spent the better part of an hour mopping, cleaning, wiping, and sanitizing, while Lead Designer laughed and Grunty cowered. But where was I in all this? Well, being the big-hearted, generous girl my mother raised, I did the right thing. I sat at my desk and thoughtfully shouted encouragement to Roger and his mop.

And the moral of the story is: work from home.