Maybe there’s unspoken agreement to retain her because she’s the coworker everyone loves to despise. There’s always going to be one, and we’re all so comfortable having Cindy fill the position. And she’s the lowest paid of us – it’s not costing the firm much.

But we’re not sure how much more we can take. Lately Cindy has gotten worse. It was bad enough when she started taking offense at certain language. That started a few weeks ago, when she expressed herself in forceful yet whiny complaint. Now Fiona feels self-conscious whenever she catches herself saying “okey dokey” and Susie has absolutely given up trying to “share” anything with us when Cindy’s around.

But the worst is her recent campaign about the ladies’ room. That’s the issue that has led to signs.

Cindy’s curiosity about the middle stall seemed innocuous. Most of us agreed with her that it must take some sort of extrovert to walk into an empty three-stall facility and choose the middle unit. It isn’t any bigger than the others and it doesn’t give you a tile wall to lean your stuff against. All it can provide is mandatory proximity if someone else walks into the bathroom before you’re done. There must be a term for that sort of gregariousness…

And her comments about some users’ bowel habits were clearly irrelevant and off base. Just because Cindy can’t relax enough to enjoy a shit in a public facility doesn’t dictate the comfort or urges of others. And face it; most of us use the office bathroom more than any other. It isn’t exactly public. Just shared. That’s what makes it seem strange when one hears the pull-at-an-angle whisk of a paper seat protector leaving the wall dispenser in an adjacent cubicle – we’re 16 floors up – does the woman next door seriously believe one of us is diseased? It’s even worse when you lower your naked thighs confidently upon the split seat and encounter wetness; that feels like actual betrayal. But it isn’t particularly useful to hear Cindy’s repeated rants about it. She’ll even stagger away from you after that complaint, stiff-kneed and swatting a bit at the back of her thigh as if it were still urine-spattered.

She hung the first signs in the ladies’ room after she saw the video about wasted paper towels. Some TED talker provided (impractical) lessons about how to wipe down the world with one folded sheet of paper and Cindy decided Adrienne needed to learn a lesson. Cindy is too passive-aggressive to talk to Adrienne (and Adrienne’s paper towel use isn’t just about herself anyway; we’ve all walked in on her mopping up the sink counters, and I’m sure some of us have dry bags as a result of her tidiness).

Everyone knows that the far stall sometimes has a flushing issue. We get the building engineer in about once a month and he repairs it for awhile, but that toilet usually doesn’t completely flush unless you hold the lever down. We agree it’s obnoxious, because like any public facility ours doesn’t have bowl covers, so there’s no way to avoid breathing over-the-flush air the whole time you have to stand there with your foot on the lever while the water is swirling in the bowl, and we’ve all read somewhere that toilet air is really unhealthy, and some of us have even had lingering intestinal issues until we learned to put our toothbrushes in cupboards or store them in protective cleaners.