So I don't know if this happens at your office, but it's happened at the last three jobs I've worked at (Pinterest, Facebook and Wells Fargo): You walk into a stall in the ladies' room, and the seat will be absolutely covered in bright pee-yellow pee.
So much pee, it couldn't possibly be a mistake. The quantity of urine is almost aggressive in its plentitude.
Other women will put up signs ranging from polite-but-vague ("Please clean up after yourself!") to full-on wet-bottomed rage ("STOP PISSING ON THE SEATS, ASSHOLE!!!" -- which is always funny what with assholes being the one thing that can't really pee).
But the signs usually don't do much to remedy the problem.
They did work at Facebook... for awhile. The pee incidents were reduced to a trickle, and seats stayed mostly dry for a couple months. But over time the signs got taken down, or replaced with sheets of complicated code problems (learning new coding tricks while you void your nethers being just one of many uniquely strange things about working in tech).
And here's the crazy part: As soon as the signs were gone, the peeing ramped back up again! It's like the peeople interpreted the lack of angry signs as some kind of invitation to start peeing everywhere again?!
It's not like the pee-for-all is a secret. We all stand at the sinks trading theories about what's going on. Some people believe it's a learned thing: Some people just grow up standing on the seat to pee. But I don't know... what with all the signs and the ubiquitous PROVIDED BY THE MANAGEMENT paper seat covers, doesn't it seem like eventually you'd learn that the custom in the office is to leave the seat clean, or at least mop up afterward?
I mean if this was like a Giants game or some other epic gathering of beer-ful people, yes. I expect to sit in puddles of nope there. But the office? Where there's just a few of us? Who all know each other? Really?! The whole thing is very mysterious.
So mysterious, in fact, that I started wondering if maybe the pee-ers weren't even aware they were doing it. What if some kind of werewolfish transformation took hold of them? Like one second they're heading off to the bathroom, and -- poof! -- the next second they're back at their desk, their hair and clothes disheveled, all what just happened?
For that matter, what if the pee werewolf was me?! After all, who was the one person that all three workplaces had in common? EVANY THOMAS, that's who!
So now I've started patting the toilet seat each time I get up to make sure it's dry. And then, once I've resettled into my clothing, I turn around and slowly back my way out of the stall, keeping eye contact with the seat all the while -- just to be sure my urethra doesn't go on a walkabout behind my back.
And then I go wash my hands very, very thoroughly -- pee werewolf self-vigilance not exactly being the most sanitary hobby I've ever had.
This post originally appeared as "Am I the Pee Werewolf?" over at Medium.