May 16 2008
Personal

The Office Restroom

I hate going to the office restroom, or any other public restroom for that matter. I didn’t have this aversion when I was a kid. I could pee anywhere! I’m not sure what happened, but somewhere in my 20s I began to feel intense anxiety when forced to use public facilities. I now live in a world where I have developed a complex ritual for using the restroom when I’m at work.

In my last job there was one restroom available for the entire company. The facilities included two toilets and two urinals. With this limited arrangement I had the opportunity to observe the various restroom habits of my males colleagues. I observed four different types of folks in the office restroom: Talkers, Non-Talkers, Washers and Non-Washers. The traits can be mixed and matched, as in the Talker/Non-Washer or the Non-Talker/Washer.

Talkers intrigue me. You’re at the urinal and they walk up, unzip and enthusiastically ask how you’re doing. For the love! Leave me alone! I’m using the restroom! I don’t want to engage in small talk while I pee. Non-Talkers are better, but there’s still the awkwardness of two people standing less than eight inches from each other, staring at a wall listening to the ambient sound. The urinal duet.

The Washer/Non-Washer issue is much more disturbing to me. Non-Washers are generally older. Non-Washers are also usually Talkers. They chat it up at the urinal and then they zip up and walk out. Amazing. I never knew that so many seemingly normal people do not wash up after. Learning this has made me even more of an obsessive hand washer, and has made me even more wary of Baby Boomers.

Being in a multi-level building for my current job has made it easier for me to avoid others in the restroom. Instead of one restroom there are eight. This brings me to my restroom ritual. I am on the sixth floor and the rest of my company is on the eighth floor. In order to avoid small talk I will usually go to the seventh floor restroom when I head upstairs for meetings. Eventually I noticed that others on the eight floor use the seventh floor restroom as well, so that has sent me downstairs. The fifth floor is locked, so I have to head down to the fourth. If someone is there I will go to the third floor. I get a lot of exercise walking the stairs. I guess my neurosis isn’t all bad.

Did I mention the Stinkers, the Farters and the Readers? Maybe next time.

Apr 28 2008
Home-Based Business, Personal

Off The Grid – Part 2

I think I know what my problem is. It’s a simple problem to define, but not so simple to solve. I don’t like being anywhere at a specified time. I don’t like to stay anywhere for a set amount of time. I want to come and go as I please. I want control of my time… period. Is that so hard to understand?

I know that there’s nothing special about that desire. Everyone wants to control their time. My problem is the “crazy” that starts bubbling up in me whenever I feel trapped somewhere. I start getting irrational when I feel trapped. I simply desire mobility.

I can remember standing in the back of a semi trailer when I worked for the now defunct Roadway Packaging Systems. I was a truck loader. I stood at the end of a giant conveyor belt while box after box rolled my way. I was supposed to: 1. take the box, 2. look for the last three digits of the destination zip code, 3. write the digits on the box with a red wax pencil and 4. stack the box in the front of the trailer.

As the boxes rolled my way I would catch glimpses of the sky between the brick wall and the trailer opening. I wanted nothing more than to squeeze myself into the six inch space and escape. That day I fought this desire until my lunch break. At lunch I called work from a pay phone and quit my job without explanation. There was no good reason, but I had to quit. After I hung up the phone I went to a city park where I used to play as a child at sat under the open sky for an hour. I felt weightless.

No matter where I work this desire to be free lies in wait, just under the surface. When I was a Kinko’s delivery driver I enjoyed a nice level of freedom, but even then I would fantasize about driving away in the delivery truck. Just keep going north on 75 and figure out the rest later.

Now I find myself behind this computer. My view of the world for eight hours a day is through a computer monitor. I can see what the weather is like at weather.com, because there are no windows in this small office. I’m stuck in this chair each day, and I talk to people almost exclusively over the phone or IM… rarely face to face. I can feel the crazy bubbling up a little more each day.

I’m no longer in the place where I can just walk out and go sit in a park. I have little people who depend on me. These little folks keep me sane… or at least responsible. For that I thank them.

My escape will need to be better planned this time, and it will need to have some staying power. This is part of dropping off the grid for me. I need to find a way to generate income while avoiding a position within corporate America.

There are options. More to come.

Apr 21 2008
Home-Based Business, Personal, Politics, Raves, Religion, Society

Off The Grid

I’ve never really considered myself to be a counter-culturalist. In my mind that label is reserved for old hippies and people with extensive body piercings. Held in comparison with the general population I imagine that I come across as the picture of conformity. There’s nothing overt about my appearance or behavior that speaks to anything other than maintaining the suburban status quo. However, I cannot escape the idea that I do not belong. This idea really isn’t anything new to me. I’ve felt this way for most of my life. The difference now is my perspective. I’ve been trying to “fit in” for all these years with varying degrees of success, and I’ve recently had a revelation: I don’t want to fit in.

The term “off-the-grid” is generally used to describe people who have chosen to unplug from the electrical grid that supplies most American homes with electricity. I’m using the term in a social sense. Just as there is a network that has been built to make it easy to get electricity into your home, there is a social system that has been established to make living ‘the American Dream” simple and standard. The problem for me is that the outcome is templated and boring. I no longer want to conform to the set standards in order to achieve a standard life.

The two main ingredients for living off-the-grid for me will be self-employment and home-schooling. Two topics that elicit simultaneous pity and revulsion from typical suburbanites.

More to come on this subject.

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