Before the soap dispenser, cleaning your hands after dropping a deuce here at work was not very easy. Sure, we had a hand soap dispenser, but it was small, and portable, and was often nowhere to be found when it was time to get poop off of your hands. Maybe it fell in the garbage. Maybe it was on the back of the toilet instead of the sink. Maybe it was in the toilet. Maybe I should have located its whereabouts before I dropped my pants. Regardless, the new soap dispenser is actually affixed to the wall, so it should not fall into the toilet, unless otherwise provoked.
Another problem with the old soap dispenser (which was, let’s be honest here – a plastic tube of hand soap) was that it was often empty when it came time to draw soap from it. Here were the options if faced with such a predicament:
A) Remove the top, and fill the plastic bottle with some water. This way, the remaining soap will mix with the water and, more importantly, actually squirt out of the tube. Sure, the mixture will be a little watered down, but it is much better than not washing your hands at all.
B) Locate the master bottle of liquid hand soap. Here was the previous process we had installed for filling up the hand soap: Open the top of the little hand soap bottle, and squeeze into that the soap from a slightly larger bottle of hand soap. Now, you may be saying to yourself, “Why not just use the slightly bigger bottle as your hand soap?” Well, I’m glad you asked. Here’s why – the slightly larger bottle did not have a pump. You need a pump for the hand soap, or else you get your poopy hands all over everything. Of course, if you forgot to do this before taking a poop (as I always did), then you got your poopy hands all over everything anyway. Seriously though – I cannot tell you how many times I found myself, pants at my ankles, awkwardly pouring soap from one bottle to another, as if I were some kind of mad scientist, all the while trying not to use the main part of the hand that I just used to wipe my ass. It was usually at this point when I would say to myself, “I really need to get a new job.”
C) If both the hand soap bottle and master hand soap bottle were completely empty, the last resort – and I mean last resort – was to utilize the bar of soap sitting on the sink. Let’s just say, if you worked at this office, you would not be willing to share any kind of sanitary-related devices with anyone, much less a sketchy white bar of soap with mysterious hairs embedded into it. I avoided that thing like the plague, which is probably because it had plague all over it. In fact, that bar of soap hasn’t changed in size for the past three years, because everyone is too scared to use it. I don’t even know why it’s still there.
D) Somebody (me) had to inform the front desk that more hand soap was required in the men’s room. For some strange reason, the woman who works at the front desk here is in charge of the hand soap. She bills our advertisers, does payroll, and disperses hand soap as deemed necessary. That is her resume. The whole process makes as much sense as me being in charge of Tampax for the women’s room. “What? But I gave you some last month!” You basically have to get her approval to wash your hands. Every single time I have approached her with the request of additional hand soap, she is aghast that we have run out of the hand soap she gave me seven months ago. We are pooping too much, she says. She does not say that. But still.
So, it’s fairly obvious how excited we were to see the new hand soap dispenser in the bathroom last week. It was a huge surprise – there was no talk whatsoever about such an occurrence. It is now a pleasure-filled, stress-free experience to go to the bathroom here at work. Of course, the new dispenser has not had to be refilled since its installation, and the inevitably of that situation is beginning to cause me much heartache. I imagine that the process for refilling this soap dispenser is more complicated than pouring soap into it from a bigger soap dispenser. It may even require a screwdriver. I hope nobody threw out the old soap dispenser.
