I had a moment of sheer weirdness the other day that I need to talk about. I feel I need to over explain this so I don't sound like a complete creep, so please bear with me.
First off, I need to make it clear that I am a very private bathroom person. I don't like going in groups and I don't like people talking to me through stall doors. All I want to do is do whatever I've got to do and get out. That's just how I am. I also like to let others do whatever they've got to do without bothering them.
Secondly, our company doesn't have its own bathroom. There are public bathrooms out in the hallway that we share with the other office on our floor. As far as the ladies' room goes, it's very rare that two people are in there at the same time but, of course, it occasionally happens.
I went in there on Monday and headed for one of the stalls and only when I got near it did I notice it was shut, so I course corrected and went into another stall on the opposite side of the room. While I was in there, I realized that other than my own breathing, the room was deathly still and quiet. Now, if you've ever been in a public restroom with another person, usually there is the sound of movement, or they clear their throat, or feet get shuffled. There are signs of life, in other words, so I wondered to myself if the door had just been closed, or if there was actually a person in there. For reasons I still do not understand, I glanced along the floor and noticed that there was indeed feet under the stall, and with my curiosity satiated, I did what I had to do and left.
Several hours later, I went back in the bathroom and noticed the same stall door was closed. I could see the same shoes were still under that same door and they were still not moving, and the room was again deathly quiet. Now look, I get that people have issues and sometimes camping out in a bathroom stall is a necessity. I'm aware that in those moments a person is vulnerable and doesn't want to be disturbed. I'm more than willing to leave them alone. But I'm not wrong to think that's weird, am I? The same feet under the same stall hours later with no sounds or movement or even rustling of clothes?
So my mind immediately went "Yep, that lady is dead. There is a dead lady in that stall who has died and no one is going to know because no one wants to bother someone while they're using the bathroom." It CONCERNED me, but did I do anything? No, I did not. I have no idea what the etiquette is for that situation. My sense of personal propriety overcame my worry that there was a dead body in the bathroom and so I left. I'd love to say that I did the decent thing and asked if she was ok, but I didn't. I just went back to the office, sat at my desk, and hoped that someone else would go in and, if the lady was indeed dead, they would deal with it. I Twitter crowd sourced some ideas on how to unobtrusively check if the person was alive, and what I got back spanned the spectrum of turning off the light and seeing if the person objected, to blasting an air horn, but I did neither of those things. I did tell one of my coworkers to go and look, but that was the extent of my actions.
All of this turns out to be fairly anticlimactic in the end, because when my coworker did go to the bathroom later, she said the stall was empty. However, I never saw anyone come out before then and I have a direct line of sight from my desk to the bathroom door, so either the bathroom is haunted, the person in that stall crawled through the drop ceiling to go back to their lair in the walls, or someone went in there and unobtrusively Weekend-At-Bernie'sed the dead lady out of there so that there wouldn't be a fuss. I still don't know, and it has bothered me ever since.
