Bathroom Adventures in the Newsroom

I’ve been posting a lot lately. This is my effort to make my blogs shorter – just means you get more of them. Haha.

So, I had an extremely potentially awkward moment in the bathroom just now. I washed my hands and then realized there were no paper towels. Normally, this would not bother me, and I wasn’t going to let it bother me, but then I saw a small piece of a paper towel sticking out of the cabinet door where they put the paper towels in.

Of course I tugged gently on the rogue towel, just to see what would happen. To my shock and dismay, the small metal door opened, displaying a plethora of paper towels that had been stacked inside – we weren’t out at all!

This was the moment they chose to fall on me.

The wobbling was extremely noticeable. My first instinct was to close the door, naturally. The door, of course, would hold up the precarious paper towel tower. However, this was the kind of door that doesn’t have a latch because it’s supposed to be locked with a key, because apparently we are overly concerned about paper towel theft here. So the moment I stopped pushing on the door, it opened right back up, only to have the towels start cascading down on me.

Now, this whole situation was worsened by the fact that there was someone else in a bathroom stall behind me. If I had been alone, there would have been no embarrassment, no awkwardness. But I really didn’t want to experience that moment when the other woman walked out of the stall only to find the newest intern standing in the midst of a paper towel explosion.

Thinking quickly, I grabbed at the falling paper towels and got a stack in one hand, while holding the tower up with the other hand. This still wouldn’t do – what would the woman think if she came out to find the newest intern caught red-handed in the act of what definitely appeared to be paper towel thieving, the very act that the usually locked door was trying to attempt!!!

I set down the stack on the counter, in an effort to save other women from the very predicament I was in, managed to gather all the falling towels and set them securely on the pile, and get the cursed door to shut without reopening. I finally dried off my dripping hands, and escaped the traps of the bathroom before the other woman came out of her stall.

Success. But I will never drink another chai in the morning at work. Those things run right through you. Although, that’s probably a lie.