So I walk into the toilet at work the other day, and head for my favourite cubicle (from the door, furthest on the right. I have this thing, you see. I don’t like cubicles on either side. I have to be at one end. But anyway, I digress). Open the door, turn around to close the door, turn back to the toilet, lift the lid…
BLOODY VAGINA PRINT!
Right there, on the front of the seat. A perfect outline of vulval glory. It’s on a white seat, so it’s not like it’s hard to see. Some chick has sat, had a bleed on the seat, stood and turned to flush, put down the lid and then just left.
Eww, eww, eww. I flee to the other end of the line of stalls and carefully inspect my next choice of seating for the previous occupant’s…ahem… “autograph”.
That’s the only time that that particular problem has ever occurred, in my experience anyway. But I do get sick of bitches pissing on the seat. Really, I doubt anyone we work with has cooties, and it’s not like the general public can just waltz in and use our bathroom facilities. So the hover is completely unnecessary. Either park your heinie and tinkle in the hole, or mop it up bitch!
In every call center I’ve worked in, we’ve had those industrial-strength microwaves that can cook a bag of popcorn in about ninety seconds instead of the five minutes recommended on the bag. And every day—every single day, at least once diring my shift—some idiot would put a bag on to cook for five minutes and it would stink the whole place up. At my current workplace, they have signs on all the microwaves telling us not to cook popcorn in them because it sets off the smoke alarms. Well, it wouldn’t do that if you only cooked it for ninety seconds! Jesus, people are stupid!
Wow, you guys have it bad! All food where I work is stored in the fridge in the cafeteria, and at the start of the day (about 6am) the kitchen staff go to the fridges and afix little labels with the previous day’s date onto any food item/container still in the fridge. If it’s still there X days later (I don’t know their exact rule) they just toss it, Tupperware and all. Very convenient. Coffee comes from the same places, and the washrooms are cleaned twice a day. There are advantages to working in a GMP facility.
The slobs, however, are my co-workers as they do their work. I don’t know how many times I’ve gone to use a balance and have to wipe up mysterious powders from the area, not knowing what they are. A simple buffer salt? A Category 3 active ingredient? who knows? But there it is, all over the counter. Some people are nice enough to put down paper towels to catch the spillings, then leave the paper towels next to the balances. People tuck bottles of things all over the place so they don’t have to look for them later…I recently found a large drum of active ingredient (pure drug product) sitting in a cupboad. The expiration date was 2 years ago. It was next to a loosely capped bottle of acetonitrle (which, at least, seemed recent). Yay! fumes! The manufacturing and packaging people are actually less at risk, because they don’t have the idiots thinking to themselves “well, it’s just a couple of grams, it won’t hurt anyone!”
While coffee spillings next to the sink are nasty, I sometimes think I’d rather deal with that than with potential exposure to high-potency active ingredients in the early enough stages of development that no one really knows what the hell it will do to you. sigh
Until a new (and hopefully soon to be old) employee started working at my company, the worst of the problems was the aforementioned pee dribblings on the toilet seat and the paper towels on the floor. It’s a manly shop full of manly men, so you can imagine how often it gets cleaned to begin with.
Since the aforementioned employee has begun working there, I have had the pleasure of discovering many of the results of his oral fixation: sunflower seed shells spit all over the shop floor; cigarette butts (which aren’t even allowed to be smoked inside) stamped out and smeared across the shop floor; and perhaps most disgustingly, soda bottle spittoons, with no top, filled nearly halfway with saliva and chewing tobacco juice, and typically tucked behind something so as not to be found for several days.
In a sort of related note, since his hiring, sodas, energy drinks, gatorades, and even whole lunches have begun disappearing out of the fridge.
My most previous office job had several popcorn burners too. Hate that smell.
If I ran an office, I’d have a rule like this. If your old rotten food is clogging up the fridge, out it goes. Perhaps I’d put up a list of acceptable “weekend storage” items, like milk, canned drinks, etc. Everything else gets tossed Friday @ 5pm.
Yup. I worked at a place like that. We won’t even get into the fight I got into with a guy who left his leftover lunches repeatedly and for so long that they were fuzzy, basically being the cause of the new “Everything tossed on Friday afternoon” rule, then wanted his Tupperware back when I took it out of the garbage, took it home and bleached it, and started using it for myself. (I was poor and it was good Tupperware, okay? A little bleach and it was good as new.)
Popcorn burners are the worst. They should be flogged. Repeatedly.
I don’t even like popcorn, and I especially hate that smell.
Of course, I used to work with a girl who would make popcorn everyday. The microwave in our kitchenette didn’t have the turntable anymore, so you had to set stuff off to the side a little, so it wasn’t touching the knob for the turntable in the middle of the oven. She was completely oblivious - she’d put the popcorn bag right in the middle, set the timer for 10 minutes and wander away. She’d wander back 15 or 20 minutes later to get it and always wonder why it was all scorched. Then she’d start all over again with a fresh bag.
More than once I (or someone else who was nearby) would pull her smoking popcorn bag out of the microwave, throw it in the sink to douse it with water and then threw it away.
That, of course, would set her off. “Why did you throw away my popcorn? It was fine!”
Yeah, a smoking bag of popcorn is ‘fine.’ :rolleyes:
That horrible smell would permeate the entire are where I sat. It’s just gross.
Last office I worked in, mandatory common space cleanliness (and end-of-day desk cleanliness) was also part of the orientation. And uniformly enforced by our office manager. Even the firm partners had better not leave any kind of mess in the kitchen, and anyone who went in at any time and found something out of place was under orders to clean it up immediately. Food in the fridge was supposed to be labeled by date when put in, and every other Friday a notice was sent out to either make sure it was claimed and labeled with an expiration date or it would be tossed.
I don’t think I ever found so much as a dusting of coffee sugar on the counters, and there was always fresh coffee because everyone was trained to make new immediately. (The one time someone didn’t, my boss came in and fired off a firmwide nasty email, to which he was greated with joking along the lines of, “Oooh, he’s sure grumpy when he doesn’t have his coffee, isn’t he?” – but it also didn’t happen again.)
of course, it probably helped to know that non-partners could be fired for messiness, and partners could have their lives made a living hell by office manager (billings not prepared timely, checks not signed timely, etc.) if they didn’t comply, too. But since they’d hired her, they followed her rules with no argument.
Oh, and the last four offices I’ve worked in had a “no popcorn during normal business hours” rule, both to prevent burnt popcorn smell and to avoid non-burnt popcorn smell, which can be unbelievably distracting. Especially when it’s someone in the office on the next floor making it and it seeps through the air vents and there’s nothing you can do about it but get hungrier and hungrier.
It’s really not that hard. All it takes is one person in authority with some backbone.
