Excuse Me, While I Piss This High
My company has adopted a new method of spurring us worker ants on to greater heights.
It involves placing motivational quotes in a small frame mounted at eye-level above the urinal in the men’s bathroom.
Today’s quote read as follows: “If you want to stay young, keep going at whatever it is that keeps you going. For me, that’s hard work, and lots of it.”
Apparently Ingrid Bergman, whose hard work consisted mainly of lounging around in bars listening to pianos, came up with this pearl of wisdom.
I did not find that being told to do more work was particularly motivational.
To begin with, as a real estate agent might confirm, it’s all about location, location, location.
When I’m micturating, I am concentrating on only one thing: making sure that the direction of the stream is conducive to walking away with confidence, even in light khaki trousers.
Since this necessitates peering conscientiously into the bowl, I do not need to be distracted by facile attempts to make me work harder. And the sad thing is that I was so mystified by the fact that someone had thought that this was appropriate, I couldn’t stop my eyes returning to it. It was like watching a seventeen car pile-up on the freeway, except with more dangling.
Location aside, I’ve never been one for deriving great and important insights from those posters that feature such words as ‘DETERMINATION’ and then have a picture of some grinning guy planting a flag on top of a mountain. I find them puerile and an insult to my intelligence. I mean, it really takes determination to climb Kilamanjaro. Lots of it, I’m sure. But I don’t think that the same determination is really required when putting together a spreadsheet detailing how often the printer needs ink.
Whatever… it’s not nearly as bad as a quote that blatantly and unapologetically says ‘Get back to work, minion, a simple urination shouldn’t take you this long”.
When I was a young kid at school, the wall between the girls’ stalls and our rudimentary pissoir was about six feet tall. With real effort and a seriously overful bladder, it was possible to pee over the wall and onto the head of some unsuspecting nine year old. Richard Shepherd, in particular, was an expert.
Any bets on how long before I put the same trick to use on our latest motivational quote?