Change is Difficult

Don’t get me wrong. I adore my new office space. Currently, I am inhaling through my nose and still enjoying that new carpet smell. The taller cubicle walls offer more privacy – I can finally play The Barber of Seville over my computer’s tiny, built-in speaker without seriously disturbing my coworkers. The rooms themselves have a lot of character to them, with exposed brick, and rough-hewn rafters and support beams, and exposed piping and tubing running criss-cross along the ceiling.

Being the only female on the second floor of our renovated building, I realized several weeks ago, I get a bathroom all to myself. Considering that I’ve worked in emergency rooms, in which I was regularly dirtied with various fluids not my own and maintained my professionalism, one would think that I wouldn’t have any qualms about sharing a few square inches of porcelain and plastic with my fellow humans. But one would be very, very, very wrong in assuming that. We had a unisex bathroom in our old department, but considering that my male employees outnumber me twenty to one, and are not known for their stringent position on hygiene, I was happy to walk to another department to use the ladies’ room. And only once, during a dire emergency, have I entered a men’s room for business purposes. (Okay, it was on a dare during high school to see if I could actually use a urinal. It’s harder than it looks, believe me.)

So you can imagine my joy when I discovered that a women’s bathroom was marked and set aside for the sole representative of my sex in this department. I walked in for the first time, enjoying the pristine sinks, the sparkling chrome in the place.

But then, the horror began.

You see, due to the artsy exposed rafters, the newly-erected walls cannot go all the way up to the ceiling. And because of this, and the hardwood floors and bare walls of the restrooms, the slightest noise in one restroom can be heard audibly both in the other restroom and the hallway outside, where the engineers often linger to have a private conversation or phone call. I realized this just as one of the engineers entered the next room and began to do his business.

It was all there. I tried to control my mind, but really, how could I block it out? I stayed in the restroom until long after he was gone (I had no intention of allowing myself to discover who I had just heard – that could haunt me for years), then quickly sneaked out and headed downstairs to a ladies’ room that I know has four solid walls and more privacy than a porto-potty.

Change may be wonderful, but it’s not always easy.

- Addendum this afternoon -
And now I've just spotted the second man come out of the ladies' room. Ick. I guess I'll throw in with the small number of females downstairs, adding my strength to their restroom defenses. Perhaps, with my help, we'll be able to keep one restroom exclusive.