Friday, February 22, 2008

Bathroom's Edge

I'm not going to provide a name in this story. I believe confidentiality should be maintained.

Today I walked into the bathroom by my cubicle and noticed, after getting rid of a bit of coffee, that there was a book on the edge of the sink counter. Isaac Asimov's "Foundations Edge". There being someone in the stall, I figured they had come in, set the book down, and gone to do their business. Very conscientious to not be flipping pages in there. However, I know a developer who's really into Asimov, and after finishing up, I walked over to his cube - I don't think revealing gender here is a big problem, as I was in the men's bathroom, and male developers are the preponderance - and accused him of leaving his book in the bathroom. I shall try to capture the discussion here, although I paraphrase.

Me: "You left your book in the bathroom."
Him: "I did."
Me: "Your Asimov book. Foundation's Edge."
Him: "That's where I left it!"

At this point you're thinking. He's kidding. Feeding me back my own joke. But no...he'd forgotten it in there an hour earlier (presumably on the way back from lunch or something) and had no idea where he'd left it and was happy I'd located it. He immediately went off to retrieve the tome.

Yep...in a building of 6500 people, on the first try, I found the owner of a lost book. Just try finding that skill in a strengths finder book.

5 comments:

boringsahm said...

What an excellent 6th sense! Much better then seeing dead people.

Anonymous said...

I knew you'd write about that.

She says said...

I don't doubt your ability to hone the owner. Perhaps the geocaching has helped with that skill? But, I must disagree with your brag that it was a one-in-6500 catch.

First, how many in the building men? Second, how many men in proximity of the bathroom? So you'd have to narrow it to the number of men on your floor, near that particular bathroom.

Now how many potential book owners are we talking about? 50? 100?

(Yes, I can frequently be annoying this way... sorry!)

Scooter said...

I still had to narrow it down. I had to do the same math you did, SS. Discount the women. Consider closeness to the bathroom. Ponder whether it was rouge pooper (in a big cubicle farm there's the odd person who refuses to take a dump in their own neck of the woods). So there was at least a little bit of skill involved.

She says said...

A rogue pooper? Ha! LOL. That's too funny.