WelcomeMy office
This page is not a joke. It is empirical fact. (BMcC[18-11-46-503])
"If it's yellow, let it mellow; if it's brown, flush it down." (Ed Koch, NYC Mayor)
Both at work and also in my studies at Teachers College, and other places, I have never had an office.[1] I improvise. My office has often been a stall in the men's room. Of course I "relieve myself" there. But I spend a lot more time than that, while sitting on the toilet: reading aka studying.[2] This, of course, requires privacy, but I do not voluntarily use the men's room where there is no personal privacy, because I do not believe in the hypocrisy of same-gender exposure of genitals where homosexuality is not considered natural. For that and other reasons, my office needs to have a door (above).
Professor Martin Heidegger wrote about "Being-in-the-world". I have reflected on: Being-on-the-toilet. Practical metaphysics. The Bible says we should let our light so shine before men that they may see our good works (Matt 5:16). Diogenes of Sinope acted on that premise in satisfying an instinctual urge. United States President Lyndon Baines Johnson conducted an interview with a New Yorker [female] magazine reporter, while he was sitting on the Oval Office toilet. There is honor in this world.
At Teachers College, my office was often on the 3rd Floor of Horace Mann building, where I would also think about the exposed building utility pipes and the high ceiling. In a certain job, I became much upset about how some of my mostly computer science degreed/
Ex libris guest powder room of home of a small-time grand dame: Uncle John's Bathroom Reader, Bathroom Readers' Institute, St. Martin's Griffin, Trade Paperback | $18.99 (also, of course, available used). And now (+2022.04.09) I read about a novel "The bathroom" (Jean-Philippe Toussaint) about a man so alienated from people that he lives in his bathroom. Too expensive for my anticipated cost-benefit ratio at over $40 when it should be an inexpensive paperback. But the idea still seems good to me. King Louis XIV lived in Versailles palace and I'm not sure he even had a bathroom.
I (BMcC[18-11-46-503]) am afraid of being trapped in a bathtub: too close to being dead for comfort; in the shower I'm still on my own two feet. When my mother bathed me as a small child in the bathtub, it was always a defensive struggle for me against my attacker. She apparently never thought,concern bathing or doing anything else to me: "Is it really necessary to put this child through this?"
To live! What more could an individual or a couple without children want than: Please click here? No lawn, and more (i.e.: less)!
Check out my Just so stories, and my: Puns and riddles. (Grumble, grumble, kvetch, kvetch....)
Footnotes
- ↑ This is not exactly true. I once had a job where I did have an office, where my stress level reached so high that I began to have visual hallucinations (my psychiatrist assured me auditory hallucintions were what one needed to worry about). My manager was so dysfunctional that she/he did not forward invoices to the acounting department. I did not occupy that office for longer than a year. Also I had my own office in IBM Research, where almost everybody had their own office.
- ↑ Please note that, while he had of course the run of the whole Oval Office, including sitting behind The Resolute Desk, President Lyndon Baynes Johnson sometimes chose to conduct interviews and meetings sitting on the toilet with the door [to the toilet] open. This was a well-advised tactic to help motivate up-tight staffers, and to avoid wasting time (pun intended).
- ↑ If I had an office, I would want to have a toilet and sink in it. Don't many prisoners have toilet and sink in their cell? I wonder how Theodore J. Kaczynski has it these days.
