biohazardous bathrooms

While I don’t consider myself to be a slob, I’ve never thought of myself as a particularly neat person either. When the sun shines at a precise angle through my apartment window, you can clearly see that there’s a fine layer of dust covering my bookshelves and television stand. My bed sometimes goes several days without being made. And often, dishes sit much longer than they should in the sink.

And while my apartment may not be ‘clean’, I consider it to be ‘clean-ready’. Namely, with a good ten minutes notice before company arrives I can give my apartment the illusion of clean. A quick swipe across the bookshelves, dishes moved from the sink to the dishwasher, and a quick straightening of the bed covers, and my apartment is nearly indistinguishable from an apartment that is kept in perpetual cleanliness.

It began to dawn on me, however, as I stood in the bathroom of my friend Randy's place, that perhaps my apartment wasn’t as nearly unclean as I thought. Beer consumption had prompted the trip into the bathroom and, once finished, I rolled up my sleeves to wash my hands. From my vantage point at the sink I noticed several little hairs littering the basin and a ring of shave scum with a large glob of toothpaste sitting inside.

In the mirror above the sink, I could see the reflection of the bathtub, the inside of which possessed a collection of greenish-gray mold…a color only achieved by the most ambitious of mold, and only after months of hard work.

An even greater assortment of dust and hairs, decorated the bathroom floor, reminding me of tumbleweeds, albeit these were hairy, dust-filled tumbleweeds.

I looked back into the streaked mirror above the sink and felt like a test subject inside a large Petri dish...much like all those caged animals awaiting their fate must feel like right before being injected and sprayed with different perfumes by the large cosmetic and pharmaceutical companies. I realized that I needed out of the bathroom as fast as possible.

I gritted my teeth and washed my hands, careful not to touch any porcelain in the process. I reached for a towel but stopped short when I realized that the towel hanging from the rack contained quite a few dried, pasty looking globs of an unidentifiable nature.

And as I stood there, hands dripping onto the bathroom floor, I found it odd that having just washed and cleaned, I could feel so incredibly dirty.

the disappearing sales trick

A paperless office we are not.

Invoices, quotations, and other documents must all be copied in triplicate and stored in one of the many file cabinets that line the office walls. To keep with our paperful system, digitally shared calendars that can be accessed by the whole office are frowned upon. Rather, we are required to keep desk calendars. These huge butcher paper-esque sheets sit on our desk and all daily activities must be handwritten into the individual squares. I’ve often been reprimanded because while on the phone I have the tendency to doodle all over my desk calendar.

“How am I supposed to see what your week looks like when you have these ridiculous scribbles all over your desk calendar?!” my boss Vince has fumed at me on more than one occasion.

So when Lenny, our Sales Manager, scheduled a sales call last week, he diligently wrote the date on his desk calendar and stuck a Post-It Note on the cork board that sits above his desk as a reminder; Wednesday, November 19 at 10:00 am.

This was an extremely important sales call for Lenny…namely because he hasn’t sold anything for the past two months. Clearly my boss doesn’t promote based on merit.

“They’re looking to buy three or four Roland machines- which run about $50,000 each,” he said, puffing out his chest. “Vince is coming with me…and with both of us being All-Star salesmen, this is going to be a slam-dunk sale. Just like taking candy from a baby!” Lenny’s not only delusionally arrogant, but speaks in clichés as well.

He and Vince spent the first two hours on Monday morning strategizing for the meeting later in the week. Office strategy meetings typically consist of back slapping, role playing, and more back slapping.

The receptionist interrupted their meeting at 10:05. “Lenny,” she said, “I’ve got the people you’re supposed to be meeting with on Wednesday on the phone. They said that the meeting is for today and are upset that you’re not there yet.”

“That’s crazy,” Lenny told her. “The meeting is for Wednesday the 19th…I wrote it down on my calendar and everything.”

“Well that may be the problem,” she answered. “Today is the 19th. Wednesday is the 21st.”

The realization slowly sunk in and Lenny’s face went pale. He and Vince went into panic mode, dashing around the office and grabbing samples and product literature at random as they flew out the door.

40 minutes later they were back. The office manager was at the Xerox machine coping invoices for the month and I overheard her ask Vince how the meeting went.

“We ended up walking in 30 minutes late,” he grumbled. “We only had five minutes to give our pitch.”

“Did you and Lenny try to reschedule?”

“Yes, but they told us that this was the only free day that they had until January. But I’m sure that Lenny will work the old ‘Lenny Magic’ and close the deal.”

And as I sat at my desk, I wondered if he meant the same old ‘Lenny Magic’ that has resulted in zero sales for the past two months or if Lenny has learned some new magic that he has yet to demonstrate.

obsessively observing

I had been surfing the internet a few weeks ago and ran across an article about the non-verbal communication of dating. Apparently, there’s quite a bit of body language that I’ve been missing. And with very little results in the dating department lately, I figured that a more scientific approach was just what I needed.

I’ve always been pretty observant, I reasoned. I’m pretty good at spotting toupees and, as a kid, I was always finding nickels and dimes on the sidewalk. Now I would just have to use my powers to improve my dating situation. I studied up, committing to memory all those little subconscious behaviors that we send out when we’re interested in somebody.

I was well prepared. And when I found out that a friend of a friend had a friend that wanted to meet somebody, I agreed to a blind date.

Before we had even sat down to order dinner, I was already on the lookout. One tell-tale sign, I had learned, was to notice what direction your date’s feet were pointed in…a slightly pigeon-toed position indicated that they were interested. Why this would be, I had no idea, but who was I to question the experts?

I discretely dropped my napkin several times to get a better look at my date’s feet. No pigeon-toes. Though, at one point in the evening, her right foot was slightly turned in toward her left. Did this indicate a slight attraction, I wondered? Perhaps the left side of her brain was in argument with the right over whether or not she was interested in me. By studying her feet, however, I learned nothing…though, considering the number of times I dropped my napkin on the floor, I probably looked incredibly clumsy.

More observation was needed, and I had also read that, when interested, your date will unconsciously touch and play with her hair. So when the foot thing turned up empty, my attention turned toward her head…but she didn’t make any hair touching movements at all. Though, there was a point before our appetizers came when she did begin stroking her hair…but I think that this was more because I had accidentally squirted some lemon juice on her. That’s the danger of ordering iced tea on a date, I suppose.

The article had also mentioned that when your date finds you attractive they blink more often. But how do you tell if someone you never met is blinking more than they normally do? She didn’t seem to be engaging in any excessive blinking, and I had no blink baseline to compare it with. By the end of the evening, I sadly had to admit that all of my observing revealed nothing.

We made our way out of the restaurant and, standing in the parking lot next to her blue Taurus, I figured it was time for a more direct approach. “I had a really nice time,” I told her, “and was wondering if you’d like to go out again sometime?”

“Sure,” she replied. “Give me a call this week.”

“I’ll talk to you soon,” I said. “Have a safe trip home, Lori.”

As I was driving home, I began dissecting the date…looking for all those little non-verbal behaviors that perhaps I had missed during the night. Did she touch my arm while she was speaking to me? How good was the eye contact? Did she spend more time smiling or more time with her arms folded across her chest?

And, as I sat at a red light, I realized that I had been so focused on trying to notice all these little signs, that I had let the more obvious things completely slip my mind.

Her name wasn’t Lori. It was Gina.