Toxicity Report

My crazy travelling/graduation/family/birthday week is almost over, so regularly scheduled posting (read: whining, kvetching, bitching and moaning) should resume on Tuesday. Until then, I thought I would post an update to a situation I reported a little while back, and that is the critical health crisis created by the ladies washroom in our office.

If you recall, the Chernobyl-like symptoms caused by the deodorizer spray were acted upon quickly (provided the worst symptoms suffered by victims of the Chernobyl disaster were a slight cough and tingling nose). The orange blossom spray was entombed in a steel drum and buried deep within the little-known Vancouver Island desert.

The cough persisted, and large men from facilities were called. To be absolutely sure nobody suffered the trauma of a tingling nose ever again, a basket containing dish soap, hand soap and hand lotion was also removed.

I assumed these items were incinerated in the same way as other similarly hazardous materials such as medical waste and empty Nair bottles. Imagine my surprise when I arrived at my cubicle the other morning to find the offending items on a shelf right next to my desk, without so much as a bio-hazard suit for me to wear if I was to be expected to work in safety.

I called over the Office Manager. I pointed out the proximity of the hazardous materials to the very spot I spend eight hours a day emailing my friends, surfing the web and taking scientific online quizzes to determine which Harry Potter character I most resemble.

Apparently nobody involved could decide where to put the materials until a decision had come back regarding the air-quality tests performed by the large men from facilities. It was determined the items should be hidden from the area of the office where the woman with the cough worked, assuming even visual contact with a bottle of soap could travel through the layers of her eyeball, through her sinuses and lodge directly in her lungs, producing a slight cough.

My desk is on the other side of the wall, and was deemed safe enough to store the ticking time-bombs of bathroom hygiene. If I should experience any symptoms such as a cough, tingling nose or sudden death I should maintain a log of when and how I experienced each symptom.

I'm considering selling these items on eBay. The bottles are on my bookshelf, so I'm claiming ownership. I hear there's a lot of money in potential weapons of mass-destruction. Anthrax, dish soap, plutonium, hand lotion and poison gas. Any one of those could make me a very wealthy woman. Wealthy enough to quit my job, and save my sanity.