There are motion-sensitive lights in the bathroom.
This worries me. This morning, I was taking a few minutes to… ah… re-center, and suddenly, I was alone in silence and darkness. I was pretty sure I’d gone simultaneously deaf and blind.
“Great! It’s going to be Helen Keller Redux.” That thought amused me – I played Helen Keller in “The Miracle Worker” in seventh grade (rather convincingly, may I add).
Being in the furthest stall from the door and the motion sensor, I took a minute to think through my options. I could slide my shoe across the other stalls and hope to trigger the lights. But I only had two shoes and very bad aim.
“I get up in the middle of the night, and it’s dark then, and I never seem to have a problem. In fact, I never even open my eyes.” But it occurred to me that the fan wasn’t running, and I could hear voices (of the president and someone else, both male) just beyond the door. That skeeved me out enough to risk leaving the stall prematurely. And of course it took hopping to the end of the row of stalls and waving my arms before the silly lights came back on.
I can really only think of one good reason for this installation decision: productivity. Companies pay to get the most out of their employees, so unnecessarily long bathroom breaks must be discouraged. And while they’re doing it, they’ll save electricity!
The ironic part, in my case, is that I was hired as “a creative.” I love how that adjective has so solidly become a noun, a noun that means “Because I have more right-brained tendencies and an art background and ADD and can draw, I am entitled to certain privileges and rule-breaking.” Enter irony: I’m “a creative.” I’m OCD, type-A, extremely focused, overly-sensitive to rules and procedures, and can draw. But I digress.
As a creative, I'm encouraged to do whatever necessary to keep the inventive brainwaves, er, waving. I go for short strolls around the building, walk the river at lunch, Google odd visuals, read writing blogs, Stumble around the internet, eat every three hours or so...what if I also need more than four minutes of lavatory re-centering?
We, the creative few, are a minority in the building. Motion sensors are, most likely, not intended to stifle our creative sessions wherever they may be. However, that being said, nothing infuses humility quite like waddling out of a bathroom stall blind, with your hands out ahead of you and your pants around your ankles.
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