And now, we return to our regularly scheduled program.

So what have the "bad" patrons been up to since I took two weeks off from crapping on them quite so much?

Oh, the usual...

• We still have the usual urinal non-flushers to deal with, who in recent weeks have taken to leaving sloppy drippage on both the front lip of the urinal edge as well as the floor beneath. Now they've stepped up their game and are somehow managing to get urine on TOP of the urinal itself, where it congeals in the hard to clean trench made by the sealant. Son-of-a-bitch, you'd think we'd had a pack of dogs in here marking their territory! I've now been a bit more observant when I visit public restrooms in other buildings and I must say I don't notice near the amount of excess spillage in them that I see on a daily basis at the "liberry." Engage in Intercourse with a small water-fowl, I hate `em!


• In more excretory news, we seem to have a new Serial Shitter—a Copycat Shitter, if you will. We know it's not the original Serial Shitter for none of us have seen him in for months. However, just like his namesake, the Copycat Shitter has left his calling card splattered all over the interior sides of our men's toilet and made, from the evidence, only a cursory effort to flush. This Copycat Shitter may in fact be related to our next mystery rogue...


• Some asshat has been frequently rendering our men's restroom a gassy no-man's land through the sheer power of his fecal fumes. I know, I know, this has been a regular complaint here about a LOT of different patrons over the years, but this is one guy with, presumably, one ass and the ability to completely void the warranty of any given room. We don't know who it is yet, but he has to be a regular patron, since it is occurring quite regularly. The stench is horrifying and lingering and defies our efforts to dispel it. And while I've never been on a CSI-style forensic field trip to know first-hand, to me this guy's product smells exactly like a bog corpse. And due to some damn genius having hid all the aerosol freshener, I had to combat this horror with a tiny bottle of pump-spray air-freshener and a crucifix. For a bit, I thought the responsible party might be Sunday Bob, who did return on a recent Friday and caused all hope to be abandoned by anyone entering the restroom after his departure. However, he's not been in regularly enough to be the culprit and has fumes of a different... um... flavor, I guess. We have now bought numerous cans of aerosol air-freshener, each a different scent and different brand because we know from experience with the likes of Mr. Stanky that this level of stench will wear out a given scent in no time flat.


• The Coot has now taken to shaving in the men's room, which seems the next logical step in his campaign to make the "liberry" his home. This might have gone entirely unnoticed by the staff, except for the fact that, just as he leaves piles of books in his wake throughout the "liberry," he also leaves wads of shaving cream, stray whiskers and soap scum in the sink and seemingly makes no effort to clean up after himself at all. I personally suspect he may be the culprit behind at least two of the above three paragraphs.


• While hauling boxes down to our lower-level storage area (or as we like to call it "the wine cellar), Ms. D noticed there was a light coming from beneath the unusually closed door of our story hour room. Opening it to investigate, she found two teenagers, a guy and a girl. They were both clothed, though the girl was just putting on her coat. Immediately they adopted what she described as incredibly guilty expressions. Before she could ask them what they were doing in an otherwise unpopulated area of the building that we prefer patrons stay the hell out of, they dashed out the lower level back door and were gone. None of the staff had seen anyone go downstairs in the first place, so we have no idea how long they'd been down there and, lacking any infa-red Woods lamps, can only guess what they'd been up to.

The Secret Identity of Ron the Ripper ("LOST" ROGUES WEEK DAY 5)

The time has come to tell the tale.

Some years back, on an otherwise normal day, I decided to fill my water bottle from our drinking fountain. The fountain is located at the far end of our reference/computer hall—a narrow passage where our reference books are shelved, near our three public-access computers, which are in turn in close proximity to not only the fountain but also our most-unfortunately-placed public restroom beneath the stairs. So I walked from our front room, through the children's room and was about to enter the reference hall when an unsettling and familiar odor hit my nose.

Oh, dear Lord, no!

I rounded the corner of the hall and nearly ran headlong into Ron the Ripper. Ron looked guilty and amused at the same time, but Ron always looks guilty and amused so this was nothing too suspicious. What was suspicious was that Ron and his Unobstructed Doors aide were coming from the direction of our restroom beneath the stairs. And following along behind them was the thick, yet invisible cloud of ass-stench I'd detected seconds before.

Oh, no, no, no, no, no, please, no.

Hesitantly, I passed them by and waded through the fumes toward the restroom. There could be no doubt that Ron had befouled our restroom, but the actual degree of befoulment was what had me worried.

Please, please, please, I prayed, please, let him at least have flushed!

Alas, the answer to my prayer was "No." What I found within the bowl of our toilet was yet more evidence on a mounting pile, one which would prove that two of our most notorious rogues were actually one and the same person. Ron the Ripper, you see, had a secret identity. Ron the Ripper was none other than... the Serial Shitter.

I first became aware of the Serial Shitter shortly after I took my job with the "liberry" in 2001. The Serial Shitter, I was told, was an anonymous soul who frequently had foul, unholy and always unflushed poo-festivals in our restroom and did so with such frequency and apparent glee that it had to have been done on purpose. About twice a month, usually while cleaning up at the end of the day, one of the staff would discover the Serial Shitter's "calling card" plastered all around the inside of our toilet. For you see, it was apparently the Serial Shitter's fondest joy to park his keister on our bowl and vent his bowels so explosively that the resulting spray barely even reached the water but instead splattered onto the interior wall of the bowl like turd-stucco. And because the Serial Shitter never EVER flushed, this turd-stucco would sit there, sometimes for hours, would dry and then would NOT come off without a big ass toilet-brush, a liberal amount of Clorox Cleanup, ten minutes of effort and complete privacy so as not to soil the sensitive ears of our patrons with the streams of cursing spewed forth by whoever had to clean it up. Son of a bitch, we hated the Serial Shitter!

And, oh, the stench! Sweet merciful Krishna on a bicycle, the stench could be terrible! The trouble was, it was also stealth stench, rarely reaching the circ-desk. If we didn't go back near the restroom for a while, we might not know of the turd stucco's existence. However, we soon learned that when our usual computer addicts began making for the door, something foul was afoot.

It took us a long time to start piecing together the clues as to the true identity of the Serial Shitter. We really really wanted to know who it was, so we could finally have someone one of us could grab by the shirt collar and scream "FLUSH, DAMN YOU, FLUSH!" while another of us soaked them in a glossy coat of Lysol.

After cleaning up the Serial Shitter's mess for the fourth time one month, I decided to put an end to the mystery and put on my detective cap. The Shitter's fecal hobby was definitely the result of an unhinged mind, so I began suspecting our more unhinged patrons. Unfortunately, that's a sizable portion of our patron population.

I considered that it might be Mr. B-Natural, a man who was, back then, pretty much dedicated to doing things he thought would annoy the library staff, such as sneaking in coffee, signing his name upside down on the computer sign in sheet and generally being the grumpiest old man in all the world. This didn't seem to be his style though, since he always made certain we knew when he was trying to annoy us.

Mr. Big Stupid was another suspect. He was often on the computers and looked to be the kind of man who could tear up a toilet, but I could never place him at the scene during any of the Shitter-Event-Horizons.

The Untalented Mr. Ripley, Mr. B-Natural's arch-enemy, was also on the computers quite a bit in those days, but as strange as he was I just couldn't picture his skinny butt having the capacity for the sheer volume of material we were seeing.

I even briefly suspected Chester the (potential) Molester, but while he did spend time near the computers it was only time spent between opportunities to cruise the children's room.

The more I thought about it, though, the more it seemed that the only person who was in house on the same days as and before the incidents occurred was Ron the Ripper. It fit his personality too, for Ron enjoyed doing everything with gusto, be it ripping pages from our magazines, to caveman grunting to, most likely, taking a shit. Our next move, I determined, was to keep watch on the toilet when we knew he was in house, make sure it was spotless and then do a quick recheck after he used it to prove he was the Shitter. If we could catch him in the act of leaving that shit behind, we could force his Unobstructed Doors aide to pay attention, do his job and actually make Ron flush the toilet.

Alas, the confrontation was never to come. The particular aide Ron was with the day they barely escaped quit his job, or quit Ron, soon after. Ron was notorious for burning out aides and this guy was just one in a long line. Subsequent aides didn't bring Ron to the "liberry" very often and we had no more incidents of serial shitting for many months. In fact, we saw Ron almost none at all for many months (further cementing the proof). The next time I saw him, he had lost a lot of weight and seemed on a much more even mental keel. I think his overseers must have found the magic combination of meds to mellow him out. The mischievous gleam that had been ever-present in his eye was replaced by something much more akin to what you see in Malcolm McDowell's eyes at the end of A Clockwork Orange.

Oh, we've had restroom incidents akin to the Serial Shitter since—some so horrifically impressive that we were led to question our original theories about his identity—but by and large the Serial Shitter is no more.

Good Omens `04

No worries about material for the coming year.

Outside the door to our tiny little non-sound-proofed under the stairs cubbyhole public restroom is a tall white “privacy” screen extending from the edge of the stairwell wall out to around three feet from it. We keep it there to provide the illusion that the restroom door/sink/water-fountain area is actually separate from the rest of the computer hall/reference room area. This is, of course, not really the case, but we do it anyway because it amuses us.

When I came in yesterday, the screen had been pulled over in front of the restroom door itself, blocking it off. A note on the screen read, “This Restroom Has Been Closed For Cleaning.”

Aw, hell, I thought. This was bad news.

I went back up front, where Mrs. B, was womaning the circulation desk

“Uh… what’s up with the bathroom?” I asked.

“I’m not sure. I think it got messed up by some of the UNOBSTRUCTED DOORS clients and MRS. A closed it off.”

Aw, hell, I thought again. My fears were now fully realized. The mentally handicapped clients of the local Unobstructed Doors group are infamous for voiding the warranties of restrooms throughout the Tri-Metro area. We don’t generally have many problems of this sort ourselves, though we’re absolutely certain that the legendary Serial Shitter is among their number. We have, however, heard horror stories about incidents at Town-C’s library branch, where the former librarian there, Mrs. V, once had to threaten one of the UD aides with a call to their supervisors to get the aide to go back in and clean up the fecal festival one of the clients had had in the restroom there.

Like I said, not a lot of that kind of thing at our branch, but on occasion it does happen. Typically, when it does, the UD aides wait until it is nearly time for them to leave anyway, then send their clients into the restroom for one last "johnny" session before they hit the road. On occasion, the clients use this opportunity to befoul our restroom in most unholy ways. Then the aides gather up their clients and flee the building before the mess can be discovered and anyone can tell them to go clean it up. And on these occasions, I'm almost always the guy to discover it, hours later, after everyone else has left, and am then the guy who has to clean it up. In fact, I'd say that if that restroom gets cleaned at all, it's usually me that does it. And this was precisely my fear yesterday, as I stood quaking at the circulation desk.

If Mrs. A had baracaded the restroom door it was obviously because it had not yet been cleaned. That she was saving it for later at all did not bode well for me. Still, I kept quiet about it and made no offers. I really didn't want to know what was in there.

Eventually, Mrs. A came downstairs. She saw the look on my face and said, "Don't worry. You don't have to do it."

Whew.

Just to help make me feel even better about it, Mrs. A described the carnage that awaited her in great detail. Evidently, the UD aides had not checked out the restroom beforehand and did not note that both the lid and the toilet seat had been left up. The first UD client to go in didn't lower them before having a squat and wound up defecating all over the porcelain rim as he slid around the bowl. The aide failed to check the room after the first client and sent the next one on in to add to the problem. It was a poo party chain-reaction from there.

Mrs. A said she now appreciated the tales I've spun about the horrors I've seen in there. She could scarcely imagine anyone, UD client or no, doing what was done in there by accident.

"Oh, I've seen things in that room that could not have been done without forethought," I assured her. I would certainly not count out the Artiste Factor in any of this.

The Grampy Patrol (In Color!)

So I go to Wal-Mart the other day.

Sure, I know I'm depriving my community of needed revenue by shopping at the corporate giant, but dammit I needed Russell Stover sugar free low-carb peanut butter cups and all the locally owned businesses charge $8,000 for them if they have them at all. I'm only human!

(Oh, and a word of advice to you low-carbers out there.  Allow me to assure you that it is a VERY bad idea indeed to eat the suggested serving size of 5 cups of the Reese's brand of sugar-free mini-peanut butter cups. That is, unless you've got a hankering to spend the rest of your evening running carefully to and from the toilet to do your best impression of the Serial Shitter. Not so much trouble in that department with my boy Russ, so that's my brand.)

As I was maneuvering my Malibu through Wally World's parking lot, I got behind an older gentleman driving a big Pontiac who was slowly turning into one of the parking aisles near the store's southern entrance. I immediately recognized him as a member of that international fraternal brotherhood and cabalistic society known as the Grampy Patrol—a loose-knit organization of elderly men who drive around in big vehicles, preferably pickup trucks, at irritatingly slow speeds, take twenty minutes to make a turn and who always wear hats while doing so. They are among my many arch-nemeses and will remain so until I'm old enough to join them and subvert them from within.

I pulled into the same aisle and then had to slow down to maintain the car-length of distance between my car and his, since he refused to go any faster. It was a good thing that distance was there, though, because the man suddenly came to a halt. Much to my surprise and annoyance, he then threw his car into reverse and started backing up toward me. Turned out, the man had driven right past the empty handicapped parking space near the door and had decided he wanted it after all. However, my car was at that moment perpendicular to that space, blocking the way. The man didn't seem to have noticed this, though, as he had not bothered to even look in his rear view mirror to check if anyone was behind him before throwing it into reverse. He wasn't exactly flying back, though, so I kept waiting for him to catch a glimpse of me and stop. He didn't, because he was not only NOT using his mirror but he wasn't even turning his head to look behind him at all as he backed up. Instead, he was watching the parked cars to his right to gauge his progress.

Seeing that he was going to hit me, I threw my own car into reverse. Fortunately, I DID check my mirror and saw there were several people in the pedestrian walkway directly behind my car. I couldn't back up at all without backing over them. I was trapped!

*HONK*HONK*HONK*, I honked. This seemed to get the man’s attention and he slowed to a halt. For good measure, I gave him several longer, angrier honks. Only then did his head finally swivel around and actually look at me. Still the man remained in reverse. He was actually waiting for me to get out of his way.

FINE!

When the crosswalk was clear, I backed up and took the next aisle down where I found a parking space and quickly got out of my car to go find this guy and vent my fury.

How could someone have such a colossal failure to exercise common sense in driving? The guy was old enough to have been driving for several decades, so he should know better! Anyone could have been behind him, closer than I was. Hell, a pedestrian could have been behind him and he hadn't bothered to look at all!

I soon spotted him. He had exited his car and was slowly making his way across the pedestrian crosswalk; had his Grampy Patrol hat on and everything. I started in his direction and noticed that he was already looking nervously back over his shoulder in my direction. (Oh, sure, NOW he looks over his shoulder?! ) I'm sure I had a fiery expression of rage on my face, but as I watched this frail little old man hobble along toward the door of Wally World, I was internally starting to soften.

What good could really come from me yelling at this guy for nearly testing my front bumper? Probably none. No one had been hurt, he had hopefully learned the lesson that it was a mistake to blindly throw his car into reverse and I'd already gotten to righteously honk at him, which is always fun. Embarrassing the man in front of half of Wal-Mart was probably not a good idea and would definitely not be respecting my elders.  By the time I'd reached the crosswalk myself, I'd decided I wouldn't yell at him at all.

"Pssst! Hey, pssst!" I heard from my left. It was an equally old man seated on the bench outside of Wally-World's entrance. He was jerking his head at me in an effort to beckon me over. He wasn't wearing a Grampy Patrol hat, so I figured it was safe.

"Yeah?" I said, coming closer. The man nodded in the direction of the thoughtless older man, who was only then reaching the doors of Wally World.

"That's him," the man on the bench said, still nodding in the first one’s direction. I nearly burst out laughing. Dude on the bench was trying to start a fight. Oh, sure, he was wrapping it up in civic-duty, trying to make it seem like he was just helping me find the man who nearly backed into me, but deep down this guy was trying to cause trouble.  Then, as though he had judged me too dim to "get" what he meant, the man on the bench lifted a hand and pointed his finger at the first man, now well within Wally World’s breezeway, and said, "That's him. That's the guy."

"Yeah. I know," I said.

I didn't bother hunting down the Grampy Patrol driver, though we did see one another a couple of more times while I was shopping. Whenever he saw me, he'd look nervous again and maybe shuffle his shopping cart a little faster down the aisle.

Great, I thought, now I'm inadvertently bullying the elderly.

Ass Bandits

While in the can today, I noticed that our toilet was absolutely filthy. Not serial shitter filthy, mind you, but unclean all the same. I won't go into the specifics of the mess, but it was a job that required a liberal amount of Clorox Cleanup. Unfortunately, when I looked up to the shelf where the Clorox Cleanup is kept, it was missing.

Oh, I thought, it's been moved back to the cleaning supplies cabinet. Nope. The great big refill jug was in there, but the CC spray-bottle was not to be found.

Hmm. Maybe Mrs. C used it to clean up after story hour and didn't put it back. Nope, she hadn't seen it either. We asked around to the rest of the staff, but no one had used it recently nor seen it.

I was beginning to have images of some of our more fragrant and excretory-infatuated patrons having their way with our bowl and then horking the Clorox Cleanup so we'd be stuck with their "art".

Turns out the explanation is probably more mundane. On Monday, when the local mentally handicapped patrons were in, one of them had a bit of an accident and their aide had to go out to the group van and bring in a change of clothes and some cleaning supplies to... um... fix the problem. Mrs. A saw the aide carrying in a spray bottle of something presumably antiseptic. We theorize that the aide may have used our Clorox Cleanup to clean part of the accident from the bathroom itself and may have inadvertently taken it with her when she left.

So there I was in the restroom today, cleaning the toilet with Windex.

A notion that's long Overdue

So after our financial excitement and my subsequent pissy mood, yesterday, Mrs. A suggested that I start calling the long-overdues again and I gladly took her up on it.

Part of the way we're preparing for the move to our new computer cataloging system is by trying to get people with overdues from years past to bring their frickin' books back. Granted, we send out overdue notices every month, but we only those that have been overdue within the past 6 months or so and we only send any given overdue notice three times before filing them away for future patron-shitcanning.

Back in October Mrs. A and Mrs. C went through the backlog of long-overdue notices and weeded out a lot of the books of lower value, leaving behind those books worth $10 or more that we'd really like to have back. We then called or sent notices to the patrons who still had our books (most of which were from 2002, as we figure anything before that is not coming back ever--though we are occasionally surprised). Well, we still have all the slips from that October call-fest, most of which still bear our notes from back then, with comments like "Says she'll bring it in soon" or "Will look for them" or "Swears he's never seen this book ever." Of course, very few of those folks who promised to return their books actually did, so now we have to call their collective ass again.

We the "liberry" underlings HATE to call overdues. We don't mind sending them notes, but when it comes to being confrontational about long lost books and having to hear all the lame excuses people try to lay on you, we just have no patience for it. I sometimes want to scream: "I don't care that you've been in the hospital with a pulled head for six months and couldn't make it in. You can make it in now, so just return the book! We're not even charging fines! You have NO excuse!"

With such hatred for the task, this stack of overdues-to-be-called has been sitting around for several weeks now and almost only get called when there's NO other project available for us to do. And believe me, we can find other projects. I'd rather clean up after the serial shitter, three times a day than call overdues.

Not yesterday, though. Yesterday I was pissed and I wasn't in the mood to take any shit from deadbeat patrons who've had a book out for two years. I grabbed the list and started calling. Mostly, the patrons in the stack have since moved or had their phones shut off, so I wound up putting most of these in the SEND NOTE pile. (I love these. I even got to pen the thinly veiled threatening note we include with them, explaining that patrons who don't return or otherwise pay for these books will be banned from checking out books at all libraries in the new library multi-county network until the end of time itself.) Occasionally I would get an answering machine on which I left a very polite message explaining the situation with the computers and how we'd like our books back ASAP and wouldn't even charge a fine if they'd just, for the love of God, return them. Only a couple of times did I actually get to speak to a human being.

After hearing one such call, Mrs. C exclaimed: "Wait, she's still got a book out? You should call her back and tell her I'm not ordering the interlibrary loan she requested yesterday until she brings us OUR book first."

I also found it terribly difficult not to make ironic comments on the answering machine of another patron who had a two-year overdue copy of a book called Procrastination.

By the end of the evening, ALL the overdues had been called or threatening notes otherwise sent to them.

I rule.

Update on Chesta D. (P.) M.

I think Chester the (potential) Molester may finally be getting the hint that we're on to him as far as his stealing our magazines goes.

On Tuesday we saw his car parked out front, in the half-hour parking spaces, for two hours, and knew a visit from him was imminent. Unfortunately, Mrs. A and Mrs. C fled home before he could turn up, leaving me to deal with him alone when he finally did. As he began his usual rounds, inspecting the place for preteens, no doubt, I figured he'd go right for the magazines and pilfer a Parents or Seventeen yet again. Being the lone gunman in the house, though, I didn't exactly have time to ride herd on him while leaving the desk unguarded. But I did have time to take a load of non-fiction upstairs.

So up I went with my pile O books. Only, instead of sneaking up behind Chester, who I'd assumed was nearly to the magazines already, I found Chester sneaking up behind me, as he'd actually been in the bathroom. (And, no, Chester's not the serial shitter. I've already investigated that avenue.) Well, this is awkward, I thought. Then I had an idea. When I reached the top of the stairs, Chester at my heels, I walked over to the magazine rack and very conspicuously and thoroughly scanned its contents, doing an obvious mental inventory of all the magazines, sending to Chester, I hoped, the message I'll know what's missing when you leave. It seemed to work. Chester grabbed YET another FAFSA booklet, finished his inspection of the upper floor, and then hightailed it to his car.

That was Tuesday.

Today his car was back in the half-hour parking. We'd already resolved to clock his dumb ass and call the meter maid the minute his car's half-hour was up, but he didn't give us the chance. While I was back filling my water bottle at the fountain near the bathroom, here he came on his pitstop at the can. I immediately abandoned my water and raced upstairs. As I did, I caught the eye of Mrs. A in her office. I gave her the international sign-language motion for "Chester's in the can downstairs, but is about to come up and try to steal a magazine. I'm gonna hassle him." To which she replied with the international motion for "Good one."

So I sat back in one of the comfy chairs adjacent to the magazine rack and flipped through a copy of Rolling Stone while I waited for Chester.

...And waited... And waited.

"You can give up now," Mrs. A said from the window of her office. "He just left."

Left? Left without even trying to hork a magazine? No way.

Gosh, I sure hope he doesn't think we don't like him.

Tracking the Serial Sh*tter.

I think we have a new Serial Shitter to contend with. Which, I guess, means I need to get off my ass and tell the story of the old one first. I don't know for sure who the new one is, but I suspect they are one of the "special" patrons who come in with the local Unobstructed Doors social services group. In which case it might not entirely be their fault that they keep shitting on the seat of our public toilet. All I know is, I'm a little irritated at having to clean it up.

As I've said in past entries here, Unobstructed Doors has made it policy that their aids have to bring their mentally handicapped clients to the library every week. So far, D-Day has been on Weird Wednesday and so far we've had S.S. incidents on the past couple of Wednesdays (and a Thursday or two to boot). Not conclusive, but enough to draw circumstantial evidence.

We're not the only library to have problems in this regard. Mrs. V, of a neighboring county library, reports that her public restroom is regularly befouled by the Unobstructed Doors crowd and in much more unpleasant ways than a dab of poo on the toilet seat. It seems the special patrons there have veritable Poo Festivals in her bathroom and she's fed up with it. In fact, she asked one of the Unobstructed Doors aids to clean up after her client. The aid said that she wasn't about to do anything of the sort, to which Mrs. V said, "It's not my job to clean up shit. It's yours." The aid protested that she disagreed with this assessment and believed it was indeed Mrs. V's job to clean up the shit. Mrs. V counter-protested that it was not and added the threat that if the aid didn't go in and clean up the shit right then, she, Mrs. V, was going to call the aid's superiors and tell them what had happened and insist that they have the aid come back down to the liberry and clean the shit up after all. That seemed to do the trick. We haven't had any such confrontations yet, but I fear they are not far off.

Notes on Yesterday

Beyond our adventures with Chester, yesterday also brought a couple three other developments, only one of which is actual good news.

The good news is that Mrs. J, our library assistant who recently suffered a heart attack is gong to return to work on February 3.

This will take some investigation.

Mrs. A confirmed that our suspect in the case of the Mystery of the Stolen Laptop has indeed NOT returned to use our computers since it's theft nearly 2 weeks ago. This was a patron who was a DAILY visitor to the premesis, so it seems mighty strange that he has suddenly disappeared. He's been sighted in the area, so we know he's still in town. We're debating what to do about it, but my own suggestion is that we track down the Untalented Mr. Ripley and have him retrieve it for us in exchange for computer privilages.

And last night, while trying to get all my crap done in preparation for closing up the library so I could jet over to play practice, I discovered some NEW crap. Yes indeedy Bob, as I went into our little cubby hole of a public restroom to retrieve some garbage bags, what should I find on the SEAT of our toilet but a smear of fecal matter. Not a tiny smear of poo either. It looked like someone had wiped their ass on the rear portion of the seat itself. This also did not appear to be the accidental splatter of someone suffering intestinal difficulties (a.k.a, the screaming shits). This looked almost certainly intentional. And not only was there a dried streak of shinola on the seat itself, but a more liquid manifestation of it had dripped down onto the rim of the bowl itself and underneath the actual TANK! I had to run all our patrons off and lock all the doors of the library just so no one could hear my curses as I rolled out our kitchen strength spray-bottle of Clorox Cleanup and cleaned that riesty mess up.

Who in their right mind would accidentally shit on the toilet seat and then walk away and leave it? Who wouldn't even make an attempt to clean up after themselves?

I can think of only one person who might commit such a deed with forethought...

...The Serial Shitter.

Which is kind of odd, because I don't think that the man we've always suspected of BEING the Serial Shitter even came in yesterday.

Legion of Evil-Doers (with Bashful Bladders)

Just got a call from Mrs. A. She asked if I had borrowed the library's laptop computer at some point this weekend. I had not. She sighed and said that it was now missing from its case, which was hidden away in Mrs. A's private office restroom, upstairs.

The restroom situation in the library is not an ideal one. The only public restroom we have is located downstairs, in a small closet wedged beneath the staircase itself, which is at the end of the computer hall. There's only one toilet in there and the little room is hardly soundproof. The fact that it's right by the three computers also means that after you've used the restroom anybody surfing the net knows all your business. It's bad enough when doing a #1, but God help you if you have a #2 on the docket. Then, not only will everyone know your business, but our lack of a ventilation fan and far-wandering can of Glade means they'll probably smell it too.

Now, this might seem to be a deterrent to most patrons "making stinky" on a regular basis, but believe me it doesn't scare off all of `em. At least once a week, as I meander back toward the computer hall, I'm hit with the unmistakable odor of a post-drop bowl-sinker and have to fight my way through it to get to the bathroom and spray something—ANYTHING—that might cut the stench. Half the time, there's a VERY obvious and accessible can of Glade or Lysol right there in the restroom, but does anyone ever think to actually USE it themselves? Hell no! It's always ME that has to do battle with Sterculius, the Roman God of fecal fumes. And if there's no Glade in there, I'm apt to grab some Clorox Cleanup or whatever else is handy and let fly.

And it always makes me feel more than a little odd that the owner of the ass that unholy cloud was birthed from is probably one of the folks at the computer at that very moment and that I have to do THEIR job of fumigating the whole place as they watch.

No one but the legendary and as yet unchronicled Serial Shitter has any good feelings toward our public restroom. (Well, S.S. and another mentally handicapped man who used to enjoy shoving stuff down the toilet, who subsequently, one Christmas, clogged our Ty-D Bowl with a Christmas wreath and bells so thoroughly that city employees had to be called out to physically remove said toilet from the floor itself in order to fish out the offending decorations.)

The other restroom we have is allegedly private. It's a slightly bigger closet tucked away in one corner of Mrs. A's upstairs office. For a private office bathroom, it sure gets a lot of traffic from non-"liberry" personnel. I guess some folks just don't want to pee with an audience, so they wait for Mrs. A to leave her office and sneak in for a quick wee. We know this because the people who sneak in there tend to be awfully sloppy with their urination skills and leave a few drops on the rim of the bowl. Now, I'm no stranger to a few stray drips myself, but I at least have the decency to wipe `em up afterwards. Buncha savages in this town.

It got even worse two summers ago when we had to close off the entire computer hallway for a full week to repaint the bathroom, re-floor the bathroom and varnish the wood floors of the computer hall. In order to keep people out of there, we hung a couple of truly colossal sheets of plastic over the opening to the hall and put giant signs on it saying THIS SECTION CLOSED DUE TO WET PAINT. We also put signs on the front door and at the desk advising our patrons we would not have a public restroom available to them until the work on the restroom was complete. Well, as evidenced by our tax form situation, none of our patrons are capable of reading signs.

So one evening, I heard watery noises coming from beyond the no-fly-zone-warning-curtains-of-plastic and knew someone had gone in there anyway. Sure enough, some of the heavy tape holding the plastic sheeting in place had been unaffixed from the wall. I pulled it aside and marched on in to confront our urination violator. About the time I reached the restroom, out he came. Now, even giving the guy the benefit of the doubt and assuming that he was an illiterate moron incapable of reading the signs telling him the restroom was closed and not to pull aside the plastic and go in anyway, to actually get in and out of the restroom he had to move a huge stack of full paint cans in cardboard boxes that we'd piled in front of the door to prevent just this sort of thing. On his way back out, he had to squeeze past them again and didn't immediately see me standing there with my arms folded. When he did catch sight of me, you should have seen the amazing look of guilt on his face. He began trying to make excuses for himself even before I told him that he wasn't supposed to be in the bathroom because there was lots of wet paint in there. Then, in his embarrassed haste to escape, he managed to tear down the plastic sheeting covering the hallway. Like I said, buncha savages.

Our upstairs restroom got a lot more unauthorized use that week, but there weren't' any real problems other than a few cleanups.

Unfortunately, these days the upstairs restroom also serves as a storage area for unused computer equipment, old files and records, and, most recently, the library's laptop, which is now missing and presumed stolen.

Topping our list of suspects... all patrons with bashful bladders.

TO BE CONTINUED...