The Cold War gets Hot!

I work in a large nondescript office complex which consists of approximately 12 three story buildings. My company occupies one full building and consists of approximate 500 employees, of which about 300 are men. We have 1 bathroom per floor each of which contains 2 stalls and 2 urinals. Breaking down the numbers, we have on average 100 men sharing each bathroom which makes for pretty crowed conditions during peak "business" times. Peak "business" times, I will define as between 10-11 AM and 2-3 PM Monday through Friday. A typical day for a typical male employee consists of arriving at 8 AM, drinking coffee, let's say 4 cups between 8 and 10, coffee being a diuretic, the stalls fill up pretty quick starting at 10 AM.

The afternoon rush falls between 2 and 3 PM due to the overreliance for sustenance on the unlicensed taco truck that visits our office complex parking lot. The first three months of my employment found me with no end to frustration with always finding the bathrooms in my building occupado. Spending 15 minutes every day searching for a free stall in my building is not my idea of a quality work experience, so I decided to use my God given intelligence that had earned me my job as an Optimization Manager to solve the problem.

It didn't take me long to find a solution, you could almost say the solution found me. I was having a particularly difficult time finding an empty stall one day when I gazed out my cubicle window and noticed the nearly empty office building next door. When ever my company wanted to have an all hands meeting, we would trot across the parking lot the building next door which had 2 unoccupied floors. In fact, there was talk that we may lease one of those floors due to the space constraints we were currently experiencing.

I took the short 30 yard walk that day and that experience changed my life forever. The bathrooms in the building next door were like a small slice of heaven. These bathrooms were always unoccupied, had top tier toilet paper, were complete with fully functioning air fresheners, and had a delightful hand soap that actually seem to not only clean but condition my hands. I had found my Valhalla!

I'm no dummy and I've been schooled in the tragedy of the commons. I knew I had to keep the secret of the great bathrooms to myself. If the word got out, I knew that my bathroom Taj Mahal would be destroyed. It would only take a few of the animals in my building a couple of days to turn the good bathrooms into something resembling a woman's bathroom at a gay club.

I guess I shouldn't have been surprised. The signs were all there and I had good run of almost a full year. Some of my coworkers must have noticed me on my daily jaunts next door. There is only a few reasons why a coworker would be walking next door with his copy of National Review tucked under his arm. The experience began to deteriorate over the past few months as word leaked out. I began to notice that used newspapers had begun to accumulate on the floor the bathroom. I should have confronted the cretins responsible when I first noticed people had begun to defile my temple, but hindsight is 20 - 20. I should have told them that if they didn't clean up their act, they would ruin it for all of us. To this day, I almost feel that what happened was fated. The cretins never listen and all good things come to an end.

The beginning of the end began a couple of weeks ago as I went next door during the afternoon bathroom rush. I entered the stall to attend to my business when a couple of minutes later, the bathroom door opened and someone spoke. Now I was raised with a certain level of decorum and as a result of this, I follow a number of hard and fast rules. One of these rules is that you do not speak to a man in a stall. I can imagine certain situations such as natural disasters, or terrorist attacks where this rule can be bent, but on balance I live by this rule. Because of my rule, I did not at first realize that this stranger was speaking to me. But as he repeated the question, "Why do you guys always use this bathroom?" I recovered enough to answer, "Full house next door." This bathroom Nazi apparently was not satisfied by my answer because he began a 5 minute diatribe about how I was illegally trespassing in "his" bathroom. The man had me at a bit of a disadvantage due to my current "position", so he may have won the first battle in the bathroom war.

After this incident, I went back to my building and told of my experience to my fellow male coworkers. It got hot fast, and most of my coworkers vowed not to give in to the bathroom Nazi next door. By early next week, multiple male coworkers had been confronted by the bathroom Nazi and each had similar experiences to mine. The last confrontation involved the bathroom Nazi vowing to put a keypad lock on "his" bathroom door, which I believe led the bathroom Nazi to think that he had won the war. Sure enough, one of my coworker reported the next day that a key pad was being installed.

Anything good is worth fighting for and my coworkers decided that they didn't want to give up the bathroom next door. Six months ago, my company leased the 3rd floor of the building next door. We quickly obtained the bathroom lock combination when the property management company sent it out to tenants in the building. One of my coworkers, Bobby, is a bit of a young punk and he immediately went next door to try out the combination. As Bobby was completing his business, the bathroom Nazi in a fit of rage entered the bathroom and began to pound on the stall door and gesticulate violently. Bobby popped off as he is proned to due, and felt everything was fine as the bathroom Nazi left the room. As Bobby left the bathroom, the bathroom Nazi was waiting for him in the lobby and began to physically confront him.

Bobby was pretty shook up by the incident and described the bathroom Nazi as "crazy, with strange dark eyes that were too close together." We are currently planning our next attack.