Bathroom interlopers

I have noticed a disturbing occurrence in my office building recently. I hesitate to call it a "trend" because I don't know if it has reached "trend" status. (The Bureau of Trends at the Dept. of the Interior identifies a trend as something that either 50 percent of the populace does 50 percent of the time, like pretending to care about the environment, or five percent of the populace does 95 percent of the time, like me looking at porn online.) But it's happening in my office...what about yours?

At issue is the one we call the "bathroom interloper." And while I suppose this person stands to harm no one, I think his actions say something about the state of decorum in our society.

What is a bathroom interloper? Someone who leaves his office space, where people will perhaps be aware of him going to the restroom, and comes into YOUR office space to use YOUR restroom. They can be hard to spot, as those who carry the most shame move well in shadows, but I've been seeing them. In my office building we have square-shaped floors with a hollow center where there is an atrium. On the northwest and northeast corners of the building are a set of restrooms, and also a stairwell. One has a long sightline - the length of the building - in view of the restrooms, and while walking the hall I have seen at least three people walk out of the restroom and go straight into the stairwell. The first time you think, "Well, maybe he was on this floor for a meeting and just had to "go" before going back to his floor." But when you see this happening with the same person/people over and over, and never are they carrying anything that would even make you think they were meeting with a colleague, the evidence then becomes more damning.

Here is the important thing to remember....if you see the bathroom interloper leaving your restroom, DO NOT ENTER. This person has just destroyed your restroom. I don't mean in a physical sense, like wrecking fixtures, but he has set off a gastrointestinal bomb, the result of which my very well melt your nose hair should you enter. Because you know if it's so bad that he is leaving his own floor....it's bad.

It's an interesting thing that he does....in his mind, he would rather be discovered as a bathroom interloper by someone he sees occasionally than have someone he sees often know that his waste rivals in stench the Augean stables. Either way, someone is learning that when the interloper visits the bathroom his deposit is unearthly....the people on his floor will just learn this is an unfortunate aspect of him with which they will only have to interact on a very limited basis. The people on the other floor will learn the exact same thing AND they'll learn that he has so much shame about it that he has to hide it.

I am reminded of another, much less vile offender, the "bathroom decorator." I may tell the story wrong, but my brother-in-law to-be noticed in his office building that someone was hanging strips of toilet paper over the narrow cracks in the bathroom stall between the swinging stall door and the wall and such, for "bonus" privacy, I guess, and apparently not removing them when finished. My BIL to-be is a stealth-note-writer extraordinaire and left an imploring note one day to the offeder who he addressed as "Poopy McShypants," asking him to remove his curtains when he was finished. I believe it was successful. Maybe I should start leaving a bottle of Frebreze in the restroom addressed to "Guy from the 11th floor."