finger painting

[font size="1" color="#FF0000"]LAST EDITED ON 02-28-03 AT 01:48PM (CST)[/font][p]You should read this only if you have a strong stomach.

I just finished talking to all the men in the company concerning a problem that has been going on for several months. We have someone who likes to finger paint in the men's room. Only, they don't use paint they use their feces.

Of course since the stalls have lockable doors, I see no way to catch this person. We have multiple rest rooms, and I have threatened to start shutting them and monitoring who uses the remaining open ones. I appealed to their sense of honor asking for people to report any unusual behavior.

They were warned that if we caught the person, he would be fired immediately.

Anyone else have any experience like this, and if so what did you do?
«1

Comments

  • 55 Comments sorted by Votes Date Added
  • Once, many years ago. If I remember correctly, the stall doors did come off. After awhile the discomfort of no doors and people in and out created enough discomfort that the employees came forward and asked that the doors be put back on. They were, after the employees said that they would monitor the problem. They were told that the doors would come back off if the problem continued.
  • If this were an elementary school, which it very well may be, the principal would have a teacher stationed at the door (a marvelous use of school funds). The teacher would note the name of each child entering the restroom and would restrict passage to one at a time. The teacher then would check each stall when the last user exited the restroom. If there was a match between a student entering and exiting and the artwork in the stall, I think you know the drill the principal then went through. A very real option for you is to close down the restrooms entirely and rent a few porta-potties and position them outside. Let them paint to their heart's content. The company that picks them up by truck will just hose them down.
  • If it happens again I would immediately removing the stall doors. If you want to be proactive you can sniff test their fingers when they leave, but you probably have other things to do. Finally port-o-poties are a wonderful way to deal with this, but I would wait until the weather gets really hot.
    Laughing way to hard as I type this.
    DJ The Balloonman
  • Have you noticed (my thread is all this over a pen), that the threads with the childish behavior comes from NY. Even worst, why in heavens name am I pointing this out. Maybe it's in the air we get from other states.
  • Pork has pointed that his part of MS smells of swine; but, we are not close enough to NY to affect the air quality. I've never smelled it either, so it must be localized to Pork's area.
  • The air smells wonderful out here in the clean, fresh Pacific Northwest, guys. x;-)


  • A guy in our printing department told me about a similar problem at a printing company where he used to work. They had a guy who would go into the bathroom stall and take a dump on the floor next to the toilet. (Freud could write a book about this guy!) Then one day a manager walked in during the act and fired his butt.

    Ray, I like your idea for getting to the bottom of this asinine behavior. If it doesn't stop, I'd go ahead with your threat to make everyone sign a log (no pun intended) every time they enter the restroom. And check the restroom for crappy artwork throughout the day -- or, better yet, delegate this task to employees in the group. If this doesn't flush out the perpetrator, at least he might clean up his act.

    James Sokolowski
    Senior Editor
    M. Lee Smith Publishers
  • "Then one day a
    >manager walked in during the act and fired his butt."
    >
    >I'm glad he got right to "bottom" of the problem!


  • I like the idea of taking the doors off the stalls. BEFORE you go to this trouble, you may want to post a sign in the mens' room advising if this behavior occurs just once more, the stall doors will come off and if this doesn't work, then there will be a sign in/sign out procedure to go to the mens' room. Threatening to take the doors off might be enough to stop the behavior, but again maybe not.

    It's amazing to me how filthy people are at work. It makes me wonder how they behave at home. I have heard of the feces thing and we have actually had it done in the patients' bathrooms, not in the employees' (not yet anyway). But...they do fail to flush, they throw paper all over the bathroom floors.

    In our kitchen, they never wipe the counters after they spill coffee, creamer, suger, etc. Never take an empty coffee pot off the burner (we have had many coffee pot casualties because of this). The refrigerator houses all sorts of laboratory experiments. I had to ban employees from the administrative kitchen area because of their nastiness. We used to let employees share in any leftover food, but they would take it out and leave it all over the counters. Now, we take it to the staff breakroom and let them wallow in their own filth.

    I don't think I would ever accept a dinner invitation to their home.


  • Rockie: This points out really clearly that you should revise your application to include a host of questions about their personal cleanliness habits. Get to work right away!
  • Thanks guys. It is hard not to make light of a situation like this. One of our engineers took a picture and sent it to me by internal email... then he sent another email apologizing for the !?$# email.

    Actually, this is in a manufacturing environment with supposedly all adults. One day last week the artist even drew a smiley face. Very cute and clever.

    We have several rest room facilities spread throughout the buiding but it is ocurring in just one. Last December we took off the stall room doors, but the artist struck in another rest room within a few minutes. Besides, we made a lot of innocent people angry.

    I threatened to completely shut down the rest room where it has been happening next time. That will force the perp to use another more easily watched rest room. And I told them we would assign "inspectors" to check things out after everytime someone uses the rest rooms. The next step would be to remove the stall doors.

    Unbelievable! We do live very close to Pennsylvania. Maybe the "air" is coming from there. :-)
  • I am the lone HR Mgr of a manufacturing facility (250 ee's, mostly production shop type) and thought I had seen it all until I read this! I thought one of my male employees mooning another employee during the middle of the day (and this used to be accepted practice in this male-dominated shop) was BAD...leave it to bored, "it's not- my- fault- but- someone else- making-me-behave-this way" attitudes that create the bizarre behavior of "adults." This goes in my TOP 10 List of "Employee's Finest Hour"!

  • Sounds very passive aggressive to me. In addition to being sick, twisted, unsanitary, gross, disgusting, childish, immature, and spooky.

    I'll bet you the dude's name is already on your desk somewhere. Check your most recent written or verbal warnings. This guy isn't a frustrated artist. He is a pissed off (sorry) employee.

    Good luck in catching Vincent Van Go #2.

    Paul
  • >Sounds very passive aggressive to me. In addition to being sick,
    >twisted, unsanitary, gross, disgusting, childish, immature, and
    >spooky.
    >
    Paul: I took the analysis a step further. If he leaves his "mark" in one stall and then "struck in another restroom within a few minutes", he has a more serious problem than those you list.


  • >>I'll bet you the dude's name is already on your desk somewhere. Check
    >your most recent written or verbal warnings. This guy isn't a
    >frustrated artist. He is a pissed off (sorry) employee.
    >
    >Paul

    Well, there is one very strong suspect. We have about 90 male employees, so kind of the needle in the haystack. This guy almost hit someone in the parking lot a couple of years ago with his car. Of course his story was it was a near accident, the other person jumped in front of him and there were no witnesses. The accuser wasn't the most credible. The FBI showed up one day to interview him. He supposedly made threats by email to President Clinton. They determined he as innocent. Something else happened involving a woman. He admitted to me that "women are different from you and me". Kinda scary. Armchair psychoanalyze that.

    We are very close to having a RIF. His manager is not convinced he is the culprit. I am trying to convince that manager since this guy is ranked almost at the bottom of his department, now is the time to say goodbye. So, yes his name is on my desk... if I am right.


  • We are a manufacturing facility with approx. 90 ee's and have had a similar problem with other bodily fluids being left on the walls. The way we have approached this in the past is when this occurs a shift manager picks an ee from the production floor to clean up the mess. The next time it occurs a different ee is picked to do the cleaning. After a short time the production ee's figure out who the mess maker is and peer pressure works wonders! No, this has not been a facilitator of work place violence and has resulted in a cleaner, more sanitary restroom facility.
  • >We are a manufacturing facility with approx. 90 ee's and have had a
    >similar problem with other bodily fluids being left on the walls. The
    >way we have approached this in the past is when this occurs a shift
    >manager picks an ee from the production floor to clean up the mess.
    >The next time it occurs a different ee is picked to do the cleaning.
    >After a short time the production ee's figure out who the mess maker
    >is and peer pressure works wonders! No, this has not been a
    >facilitator of work place violence and has resulted in a cleaner, more
    >sanitary restroom facility.

    You are lucky. I would not even want to imagine what would happen if we asked one of our employees to clean up after someone like this! It would definitely result in violence in the workplace!





  • I just want to commend all of us (especially us boys) on the remarkable display of restraint that we have shown in this thread considering the subject matter and the seemingly endless puns, jokes, and what-not that could have resulted.

    Bravo!

    Paul

    p.s.

    Of course I am ASSUMING we were all on good behavior. Who knows what salacious posts Christy keeps from our innocent eyes.


  • That's just because James S took up all the puns in post #5. He didn't leave any left for us to use! Read it again, it was a quite an accomplishment.
  • HRsage -- It's good to know someone else out there appreciates a bad pun. The only other one I could think of was "stool pigeon." My boss, Tony Kessler, suggested "bottom line" and "hindsight."

    Tony was inspired by the case of an employee who claimed that her hemorrhoids were an ADA disability. Attorneys in several states wrote about it in their Employment Law Letters, with headlines like "Rhoid rage" and "A pain in the butt: the disability or the employee?"

    James Sokolowski
    Senior Editor
    M. Lee Smith Publishers
  • I am astounded, astonished, and totally taken aback, not to mention soundly amused by the Senior Editor's creativity and word-art capability. All we lack is one of the casino HR Forum participants to make a smart 'crack' about craps. And, by the way, Paul is quite the psychologist. He knew exactly how to push this button. )'(
  • Years ago I was working in a manufacturing facility and this was happening in the ladies room. We actually ended up catching the person quite by accident (the cleaning lady caught her). Unfortunately we were a union shop so she wasn't fired but she was one of those "problem employees" and she ended up getting terminated anyway.

    I agree that you probably have this person's name on your desk. How long has it been happening. Have you had any employees get a really bad performance appraisal lately or maybe a conflict with their supervisor or manager?

    Good luck with this one and I pitty the poor cleaning person who has to clean it up.

    LFernandes
  • LF: What about this idea? Tell the cleaning personnel to not clean it up. Maybe every third day or so. Or would this just be punishing the cleaning staff? I'm trying to think of a way to get 'the group' to handle the problem. Group dynamics I think my old textbook called it.
  • One of my old textbooks had the term "diffusion of responsibiltiy" or "someone else will do it". I think that would be the case here if it was left up to the group dynamic. I'd be surprised to see someone take the initiative to clean something like that up without being asked/told by a super, if that's what I understood Don to mean. Safety's post did mention where they picked a staff member to clean it up and let peer pressure take it's course. I think peer pressure does work wonders, but would asking a random staff member to clean this up be punishment to them? Don, am I going way off course with your comment?
  • Yuk! After 3 days no one would be using the bathroom. If you unleased the cleaning people on the responsible party it would be more like a lynch mob. However, it would probably work in resolving the problem but then we would have a new issue...workplace violence #-o

    LF
  • My version of group dynamics would hold that the group as a whole would 'deal' directly with the perpetrator. Sorta like telling a classroom of children, "If one more spitball hits the board, you all stay in the room during recess." Somehow the spitball slinger is dealt with by the group. Or the wife telling her husband and 9 year old, "If the seat is left up again, neither one of you gets any sugar for two weeks." Am I becoming a bit more clear.....?
  • Maybe I should have posted this in the joke section. It has been fun reading everyone's replies. As an update, I had a meeting with all the guys last Friday and the artist has not struck since. I know there was a lot of talk going on, maybe some peer pressure has prevailed.

    At one point I suspected the cleaning person, because the same person always found it and she immediately put the finger (pun intended) on one of the guys. I thought maybe it was some kind of retaliation. But, after further investigation, that doesn't seem to be the case.

    Paul, if the puns had gone too far, would you have blamed me? :-)
  • I had envisioned something completely different! Funny where one's mind wanders when having a bad week... Anyway, if the group dynamic doesn't work, how about hiring a bathroom attendant?
  • I got it now. How bout "no more on the walls or else the group has to clean the entire bathroom" ? Something along those lines, right? I think I like it. That would get the group to put a stop to it PDQ.
  • One sure way to find the culprit...run a DNA test...bring in the CSI crowd!

    x:D


Sign In or Register to comment.