Doin's

There's this back bathroom in our clinic, away down the end of the long physical therapy/chiropractor hall and around the corner past the tiny excuse of a break room. The advantage of that back bathroom is two-fold: First, it's away from a passing hallway, being at the bendy-end of the passageway, next to the emergency exit door (to be kept locked at all times on pain of hairy-eyeball of our practice director). It's a good place to go for some 'private time' with one's bowels, should the office coffee be a bit too much. It's also something of a game of Russian roulette with the toilet seat, as there's someone in the clinic who likes to anoint it and not dry it off. If you've a brain in your head, you check the seat every time before you place your cheeks upon it. If you've left your brain elsewhere as you nipped down the hall for a quick deposit, then approximately once a month you find your buttocks all wet and saddened as you've once again fallen prey to the scourge of toilet seats. (Fool me once, shame on you; fool me 43,892 times and counting, shame on me.) Actually, I don't think it's urine, I think it's water. God knows why someone would repetitively cover the seat with water and not wipe it off. I know who I suspect but it's not something you can just go up to someone about (especially this Someone) and demand that if they're going to wash the seat that they have the common decency to dry the damned thing off afterward (and while we're on it, why the hell are you washing the toilet seat?????).


Anyway, it's a small price to pay for privacy.


But the second reason to use the far-back bathroom is that a few times a year, there's a show. The bathroom abuts the outside wall of the clinic and about every 3 months during the non-frozen season, these tinytiny ants use the bathroom as their landfill.

It's fascinating.


I was thrilled to find that his week marked their spring return. Usually, their public works are partially hidden by the wastepaper basket in the corner, but this time it's been moved to the space between the sink and the toilet, so you can sit and watch the tinytiny ants tote them barges and lift them bales. Today, they were expelling grains of dirt, each the size of 1/2 their heads (the ants, themselves are about 2 mm long) and and! trying to get these two round white things (?? small donut sprinkles?? Who would eat a donut while using the crapper??) twice the size of their heads out of the bathroom and through the tinytiny crack between the vinyl baseboard and the floor and, presumably to their kitchen so they could dine upon them for dinner (it was past breakfast and lunch). 2-3 ants at a time would try over and over to get the sprinkle-balls through the crack, only to get stymied at the end and have the sprinkle balls shoot out of their grasp and pop back into the bathroom, flying about an inch (a whopping 25mm, such a vast ant-distance, just think) each time.


I have no idea what happened in the end, whether they finally found a wide enough crack or if 1 of the 3 workers said, "Fuck the rest of them, we've been doing all the work and we deserve a little tiny-sprinkle snack right here. Bob, Tina, grab a sprinkle and dig in." In any case, by the end of this afternoon, the ants and the tiny, white sprinkles were no where to be seen. Just small piles of tinytiny dirt grains at each break in the baseboard vinyl.


For some reason, they made me think of the manufacturing plant some of us went out to visit last week. 'Twere clean and well run as a factory goes but I was struck by the mind rotting tedium and the workers who didn't seem to mind their minds being rotted by the tedium. The plant pays well for standing and running a machine 8-12 hours a shift, 5-7 days a week (overtime pays well and most work at least 6 days a week). It was loud in many areas (ear plugs required), so no chatting possible. Many of the machines were fed every 10 minutes to every hour or so, and the rest of the time was spent staring and standing, perhaps tending another machine in the interim. The worst of the jobs (as seemed to me) were the 2 women chasing each other in a 6' (2m) circle as they moved small pieces of metal from station to station, washing and oiling and assembling the small parts for tractors and other heavy machines. Loud, dull, smelling of oil and metal. The lives of the ants seemed more full of interest. And these factory jobs, being both well paying and not requiring an education past high school, are in this town highly sought after and diminishing in number. I don't know what's worse: Having one of these jobs or wanting to have one of these jobs and losing it.


I am so lucky to love what I do and to find it endlessly fascinating.


Anyway, sadly, someone (the cleaning service?) will eventually notice Bob, Tina, Lou and the rest of the ant crew and spray neurotoxins and clean away the tiny grains of debris and all will be back to dull toileting, but until then, I'm only using that loo, wet butt be damned. There's worse jobs than being an ant.