Three Hand Problem

I recently changed rooms within my office at work, relocating from the first to the second floor of the building. For the most part, I like it; my new office is roomier and I’ve been able to set it up in a way that works better for me. I’m also closer to my paralegal and that makes work more efficient. There is, however, one problem.

The toilet seat in the upstairs bathroom does not stay up when it is lifted. When it is extended all the way up, something funky happens in it and it flexes back, dropping with a loud and embarassing “CLANK!” onto the bowl of the toilet. This has never really been a big issue until recently, because it’s all women up there. There had been one male lawyer whose office was up on the second floor, who is now on the ground floor* but he was rarely in the office and did most of his work from home, so he wasn’t using the bathroom very much anyway.

But when you drink as much coffee and water as I do, the bathroom is a place you have to go from time to time. And that leaves me with a “three hand problem.” I normally need one hand for, shall we say, the guidance and tracking control system. And I need another hand to hold up my pants and keep my tie out of the firing range. So when the toilet seat keeps on dropping down, that means I need a third hand to hold the seat up, and I have to hold my body at an awkward angle to do it.

I’m guessing I need to rig up some sort of a strap to hold the seat up while I’m doing my business. A bungee cord ought to do it. I ran the idea by the bosses today at lunch, and they thought it was a matter akin to Pharoah contemplating the rats on his ships — yes, there are rats on the ships, but Pharoah is unconcerned with them.

* In the U.S., “ground floor” and “first floor” are the same thing. In Europe, the “first floor” is immediately above the “ground” floor, which is at the same level as the ground.