Deleted Scene: Foreign Restrooms

The restrooms in the stark building where we spent our working days were equipped with an Avon cologne skunk that protected the bathrooms from excessive sewer stench.  Imagine the most pungent cloying stink you can create not in nature. Now imagine that you are unwittingly misted with it for that always-fresh feeling seven times a day until you could shower ten hours later. It was like a giant feminine deodorant spray dispenser with the subtlety of twenty hot glade plug-ins crammed into a janitor’s closet.

I am positive I would have preferred the sewer stench. I am convinced it would not have lingered as long. The unfortunate victim would then have to slink dejectedly back to the drab document room inhabited by a handful of dour people looking at documents they couldn’t understand. The individuals would wince audibly when one of their ilk returned to the room as they had finally dissipated the hideous fragrance from their last personal visit to the can and had to relive their trauma each time someone had to take a whiz. It was like never leaving the restroom. I got sprayed one too many times and was thereafter forced to try limiting my bathroom exposure to twenty seconds. Hold your breath, jump into the room and take care of business quickly, pass hands under water and run out as fast as you can with the towel in your hand. With nothing in my arsenal but humor and guile, I finally devised a partial protection scheme whereby I covered the evil dispenser with the trashcan lid as best I could while elaborately trying to keep my tuckus somewhat in the vicinity of the toilet in which I hoped to urinate. At least that way the lid took most of the scented shrapnel. I learned to improvise in the trenches. One fateful morning, a female Lithuanian worker bee walked halfway into the bathroom because I forgot to lock the door. I sat on the toilet valiantly wielding my lid shield. The poor dear was quite confused. I had not been embarrassed like that in a bathroom since the incident.