The first floor women’s restroom at my work has three stalls. This is not usually a problem, as we don’t all have to go at the same time, so three stalls are sufficient.
However, the middle stall has been out of order this week.
Incidentally, the middle stall is everyone’s favorite. The stall closest to the door is the handicapped stall, which our resident wheelchair-bound employee mocked openly as being entirely too small to fit a wheelchair into. (Another single-person restroom was constructed for her use.) The stall farthest from the door is awkward, as the toilet is slightly off-center, so the user has to check between her knees before sitting to ensure that the target is, in fact, locked-on.
The broken middle stall caused a minor traffic-flow problem around lunchtime, when a group of women attending some sort of training session at our building swarmed the restroom. This required me to wait in a five-person-deep line for my turn to pee. Five minutes of my life wasted; not that big of a deal, I guess.
The broken stall caused a problem of a wholly different sort later this afternoon, as the toilet-choking load of shit still in the bowl began to smell. Bad. I dislike spending a short amount of time in a wretched-smelling bathroom considerably more than I dislike spending a lengthy amount of time in a normal-smelling one.
The odor wasn’t bad enough to induce gagging, but it was very unpleasant. Just knowing that someone’s shit was festering and fermenting behind that closed door was disturbing enough.
Update, 4:15pm: Someone finally made the stinky load go down the hole, but the john is still faintly redolent of shit, and the middle stall is still marked out of order.
