Recently I got fed up with the poor quality of soap in the washroom at the office. Actually it's not the soap itself that's the problem, but the dispensers. The little frob is broken somehow, so that instead of squirting soap into your palm when you press it, you actually get more of a watery mixture of pink goo and rust.
After just putting up with the problem for the first couple weeks, one day I got fed up, walked over to Shopper's on Ste. Catherine and picked up a little bottle of liquid soap for the communal benefit of the 6/7th floor washroom users. I guess it was to make up for those long years(?) of going without washing their hands, but my soap didn't last long. After a couple of days, the soap level was dangerously low, and already we needed a new bottle. I was happy to have brought some basic hygene into my building-mates lives, but I didn't like the idea of continually providing them with soap out of my own pocket.
The solution I came up with was a styrofoam cup placed right beside the dwindling soap bottle in the washroom, labeled (in French and English), "Support the 6/7th floor washroom 'Soap-Not-Rust' fund. Your spare change will be used to buy more soap." I even dropped in a couple quarters to get people started.
That was Thursday. When I visited the washroom on Friday, I was happy to notice that someone had donated to my soap project, and we were now up to about a dollar. Someone (else?) had put water in the almost empty soap bottle in an attempt to make it last until we collected the $3 or so for a new one. (I even planned to leave the receipt for the replacement soap in the cup for the sake of transparent accounting.)
When I came back to work on Tuesday after my long weekend in Waterloo, I went to the washroom right away to see how things were coming along. Shock! The dispensers had been ripped out of the counter, and there were two bottles full of the generic pink soap to last us until, presumably, the dispensers are fixed. BUT, the cup full of money was gone! I just talked to a coworker about this, and he said that when he looked on Monday there was over three dollars in there, and now it all is missing.
I think this is a bitter-sweet victory: I inadverntantly succeeded in shaming the maintenance people into fixing the rusty soap problem, but as revenge they stole our soap money!
4:17:10 PM 
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