However, when men are messier…. they go all out. I recall one poor male employee who was asked to go in after a customer complained that there was a “mess” in the Men’s washroom came out visibly shaken…. “Anneke, there were carrots EVERYWHERE! It was like a moose had been in there….”.

Once we had to call a plumber in when a toilet was blocked. He extracted a full set (tops and bottoms) of longjohns from the toilet that someone had flushed. A friend who works in a drugstore chain told me that the plumber extracted two cans of tuna (unopened) from the drain of one of their toilets. We guessed it was a shoplifter who was planning on stealing them but accidentally dropped them in the toilet. But why flush?????

We had people flush covers stripped from paperbacks they were going to steal.

As for messy women, we had a hooker who used to park her mother in our store while she did her business out in the market backing onto our store (when it was too cold to go outside, she was caught in the Fiction section conducting business a couple of times). The mother had some sort of incontinence problem and would go to the bathroom every 5 minutes and pee all OVER the place.

They were finally kicked out after the hooker let her little dog have a bath in the toilet. Why not when she was conducting business in the Fiction section, I don’t know. Unless it was because there was always the chance that her customer might spot a book he wanted to buy.