And who the hell....?

I work for a very large multinational corporation. I sit on a comfortable chair at a well sized desk in agreeable offices located in a business park on the outskirts of a moderately large town to the west of London.

We are well looked after. I think our employers appreciate we need a pleasant and comfortable environment in order to work and they are good enough to provide it. I work with pleasant, courteous and friendly people and I do my best to reciprocate their good nature. All in all, I can't complain and so I do my best not to. On the whole, we're a good crowd. We don't socialise together much but the office chit chat is stimulating and the place is refreshingly free of nutters, weirdos, creeps, lechers and the other types of ne'er-do-wells you often encounter in life. All good, nothing bad, I hear you say. This is true.

So what's my problem? What I cannot understand as I look around this large building of such a congruous group of people is which of them are unable to use a toilet in a competent and hygienic manner? When I have to make the ineveitable visit to the facilities I'm invariably pretty disgusted by what I find.

There is obviously a minority - but certainly more than just a few - who seem to have not yet mastered how to leave a cubicle in a condition just bearable enough for another person to use. Who the fuck are they?

There is of course the inevitable evidence of someone not being able to hit the toilet and managing to piss on the floor. Don't invite me round your place for dinner thanks. And of couse there's the usual skid marks. Why can't you use the bog brush provided and clear up the mess you leave? And who the hell thinks it's ok to leave a turd floating in the pan for the next person to have to confront? Don't you check after you've flushed that everything's gone? And who the hell feels the need to throw what looks like an entire roll of toilet paper down the toilet and not even bother to flush at all? Is this how you behave at home?

That's not all. I regularly visit the toilet to find somebody has broken the seat. I don't just mean that the seat has come off the pan, I mean the seat is actually broken....in pieces. This is a substantial piece of heavy duty hard plastic that you'd have to hit against something considerably harder (like a fucking brick wall or something) to break. But somebody regularly manages this. Seriously, you'd have to go in there with a big pair of boots and really kick off to cause this sort of damage. Who are you?

I've even gone in there and found discarded packs of half eaten sandwiches on the floor by the toilet. Who the hell feels the need to multi-task so much that they have combined having a eye-wateringly stinky crap with eating their lunch?

A year or two back, we were all asked to nominate, by secret ballot, people in the company who we felt made a real contribution to the organisation. Who do you think won? It was the woman who twice a day went around our campus of buildings and cleaned the toilets. She's not even a direct employee of the company but works for the cleaning contractors - goddamn it she certainly earned that bottle of cheap champagne. I can only think that there are a lot of people with a guilty conscience who voted for her.

Is everybody's workplace like this or is this just a British phenomenon?

I apologise for the overuse of the phrase "And who the hell" in this piece.