I coulda saved him the seven bucks....

One of my main duties at The Store is cleaning the bathrooms. This doesn't bother me, really; the frequency of nasty messes in there is a lot lower than you might expect, and, well, somebody's gotta do it. Many an Important Company Person throughout America has started out as the person who cleaned the bathrooms, so why not me?

But anyway, I've seen some strange stuff in there -- like the time I had to literally fish a baseball out of the toilet. Not a piece of feces the size and shape of a baseball, but an actual baseball. Why that baseball was in there, I don't know. And there's the unknown person who will, on occasion, grab a Mike's Hard Lemonade from our cooler, take it in the bathroom, drink no more than two-thirds of it, and leave the bottle nicely on the floor beside the toilet.

But today was one that really flummoxed me. Upon entering the men's room, I recognized the unmistakable smell that results when someone has been smoking in a bathroom. (You know the smell I mean: cigarette smoke has a very distinct aroma in a bathroom that it has nowhere else.) And sure enough, there floating in the toilet was a cigarette from which I estimate that no more than three drags had been taken.

I've actually seen that before, though. What was weird was that a full pack of cigarettes, minus the one in the toilet, was left on the toilet paper dispenser, and the receipt from the purchase of said pack was on the floor by the wall. This person spent more than seven bucks for a pack of cigarettes, took three drags off one of 'em, and then left the whole kit-and-kaboodle behind for me to dispose.

I don't know if some former smoker fell off the wagon for a minute and a half, or if some non-smoker decided to give it a whirl and realized how nasty the habit was, or what. The whole thing was pretty surreal.

Anyway....