Jay's 1st post!

Jay wrote the below to me in an email from California, he hadn't intended me to share it with everyone, but it made me laugh out loud. I figured I might as well make someone else's day by making them laugh, too. Here it is:

So I'm not a blogger, but I thought, here's the kind of thing people put on their blogs. Plus, I cant' just let it all out to you in person, so hopefully this just gives you something to read.


I'm having an issue with this office and its bathrooms. And coffee room. As you know, I drink a lot of water. I don't have a water bottle here- what I have is a paper coffee cup that holds about 1.5 cups of water if I fill it to the brim. Besides the smaller size, the coffee station where I can fill up the cup feels like it's half a football field away. If it wouldn't look so strange, I could probably get my daily quotient of jogging in running back and forth to fill up my cup. But that's not the only thing.

See the bathrooms are slightly farther away than the coffee station. And with all the water I drink, I make frequent use of them. In some ways it may seem to be convenient- I could go to bathroom and hit the coffee station at the same time, right? Well, I really have no intention of taking my open top cup into the can with me, either before or after I fill it with water. Especially since, ideally, my washroom experience should be a 2 handed affair. The alternative is to leave my cup lying somewhere close by, but do I really trust my water to be lying around in the open for just anyone to grab? I don't know these people. And I could grab a new water cup every time I fill up, but let's try to be at least a little bit environmentally friendly.

Now the bathrooms have their own charm, and by charm I mean that at some point the seven dwarves must have worked for AMCC. There are 2 urinals in the bathroom and one of them is at knee level. Perhaps there was an equal rights movement for pygmy immigrants in California. I'm thinking management is doing everything they can to encourage their workers to move in to their cubicles full time with their families.

Peeing downhill isn't an inconvenience, but let's face it, accuracy suffers with distance. Not to mention that compared to a toilet, the urinal doesn't quite contain splash back in the same way since it's not as deep. Half the time I hit the bathroom, I'm relegated to hobbit status as the full size urinal is in use. What's immediate apparent is the floor puddle from previous users who are under the same inconvenience as I am. Which doesn't help as you try to stand as much out of the way as possible to keep from needing rubber boots to go to the bathroom. Take my word for it, awkward foot positioning does not aid your targeting in any way shape or form. By the end of the day, the puddle is striving to achieve pond status and I'm doing my best Jackie Chan impression by hanging from the walls when I go to the washroom.

The end result is that about every hour, I spend 5 minutes getting my exercise by going down to get a drink, return to my desk, go to the bathroom, and then returning back as fast as I can before anyone can figure out where the wet tracks out of the bathroom are coming from or notice the water marks streaked half way up my jeans.

Don't even get me started on the actual toilets ...