The Drunken Blog

[update: the picture wasn’t showing in IE for some reason, I have obviously fixed it, but sorry for any confusion.]

I work in one of the main buildings for a rather large consulting firm. We don’t have the entire building, but we do have our name on the outside of it, which means that we pay the most rent and have the majority of the building. There are 18 floors and I work on the fifth.

Now, I mentioned that I work for a consulting firm, but just like any other consulting firm, they do other things as well. But the fact that we are mainly consultants makes for a certain work environment. Most of the people working here are young professionals, recently graduated from college and pretty bright. The problem is, all of these cats work on the client site as opposed to the home office. That means that all of the kids my age don’t actually work in my building, for the most part.

The people that work in my building are generally accountants, HR, senior executives, etc. Basically an older crowd; a crowd you would expect to be more professional than the young guns going out getting plastered every night and crawling their way into work the next day. The people that you see around the office are pretty much the stereotypical people you would expect to see when you think of “the business world”.

One thing that is important to mention is that the company for which I work prides itself on hiring smart, capable people. It’s not shy about letting people know that. And so when a company tells its employees that they are all smart and capable, a cut above the rest, those employees start to parrot that message and begin to think that they are better and smarter than their counterparts.

I haven’t been here long enough to be fully absorbed into that culture, so I think that means that it’s ok for me to say that I wish I had the mental acuity to be able to use “dick wipe” in a sentence as a double entendre. The sign pictured above was placed directly above the urinal in the fifth floor men’s bathroom.

I’m sure whoever came up with the sign thought they were extremely clever. After all, everybody has heard the phrase “dick wipe” before, or possibly “ass wipe” (aka toilet paper), or the female version, “douche” (aka vag wipe), but how many times have you actually used the term to indicate a person who is actually participating in that action? That is to say, the last time you called somebody an “ass wipe” did you call them that because the only distinguishing trait about the person was the fact that they were currently wiping their ass?

It’s even rarer to be able to use dick wipe appropriately, after all, who even wipes their dick with toilet paper? The pure cleverness of how this letter is addressed reminds me of one of my favorite movies:

Tyler Durden: Did you know that if you mix equal parts of gasoline and frozen orange juice concentrate you can make napalm?
Jack*: No, I did not know that; is that true?
Tyler Durden: That’s right… One could make all kinds of explosives, using simple household items.
Jack: Really…?
Tyler Durden: If one were so inclined.
Jack: Tyler, you are by far the most interesting single-serving friend I’ve ever met… see I have this thing: everything on a plane is single-serving…
Tyler Durden: Oh I get it, it’s very clever.
Jack: Thank you.
Tyler Durden: How’s that working out for you?
Jack: What?
Tyler Durden: Being clever.
Jack: Great.
Tyler Durden: Keep it up then… Right up.

*Note: Jack is not actually his name, he is never given a name in the movie, I only list his name as Jack for the of sake convenience.

But even more amazing to me than the cleverness of the addressing of the letter was the location, and I’m not talking about above the urinal, that’s exactly where I would expect a letter about clogging urinals to be. No, I’m talking about the building itself. This is a sign that I would expect to see above the urinal at a seedy bar, albeit, I would expect the note to be hand written, held up with dip, and stained with urine. However, I would not expect to see a sign such as this in one of the main buildings of a multi-billion dollar consulting firm.

I find it amusing that the note writer was so irked by this dick wipe that he decided he would take the time to go to his computer after relieving himself, type up the note, print it out, and then go back to the bathroom, with three pieces of tape, to post his notice.

At first I thought it was a member of the cleaning crew that posted the notice, but if you look closely, you’ll notice that there aren’t any egregious misspellings or grammatical errors – this was clearly a white collar affair.

Also of note is the fact that instead of just pointing out the problem and politely asking the person to stop, the writer of this letter offered an alternative solution – now that’s a real go-getter!

I do have to take points away for the use of all caps. Don’t get me wrong, whoever is putting toilet paper in the urinal deserves to be talked to in all caps, but I’m not the culprit here, and I don’t like being yelled at by an anonymous sign as I evacuate my bladder.

Other posts by Justin

This entry was posted on Friday, February 29th, 2008 at 3:34 pm and is filed under observations, work, Random, what? . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.