Apart from e-mails asking for advice on offing yourself, we tend to get a variety of work-related anecdotage posted to the old inbox. Today we received one such story. It's a long, detailed account of an affront to the dignity of CBS News employees. It seems unbalanced at first, but as it wends toward its inevitable conclusion, it achieves a certain kind of poetry. Should you be wary of the length, or unable to click on the jump, we'll give you the quick summary: There's some doody on the wall in the men's room, and it's been there for a long, long time. Admit it, now you can't resist.

I work at the CBS News Center at 524 W. 57th Street. There has been shit smeared on the walls of the men's bathroom for as far back as I can remember. It's really disgusting, and I just sort of expected it was a one time thing. When I started working there on a Monday, I thought it would be cleaned up the next day.

It wasn't.

Then I thought for sure when the weekend came, the bathroom would be given a good scrubbing.

It wasn't.

I thought for certain at the end of the month... then at the end of sweeps... then during Spring time, I thought everything was due for a cleaning.

It wasn't.

At last, I thought during the holidays... Christmas tree in the lobby... Still, there is shit on the walls...

Every cleaning deadline I have set for the withdrawal of the dried dung from its current occupancy on the cream colored walls has passed without acknowledgment, except in my own silent discontent.

The entire building is falling apart. Seriously, every other news network offers little tours of their studio. The Newscenter is an old, converted dairy factory that still smells like cow in the basement. There's still straw on the ground down there.

Oh, but back to the shit on the walls...

Sometimes, when I am in the stalls, I like to look at the brown fingerprints and think to myself, "Where did all this come from? How long has it been here? Are these the fingerprints of Dan Rather? Did he smear his bowel movement along the wall as an act of defiance when he asked to step down from the Evening News? Did Walter Cronkite defecate into his hand immediately after declaring the war in Vietnam was unwinnable? Did the late Ed Bradley, 'the Embodiment of Cool,' smear his excrement along the wall as a sort of foray into abstract art? Was this his social commentary on broadcast news? (He was very, very cool as you can tell by the earring he used to wear...) Is there a message in the mess? Deep Throat told Woodward and Bernstein to follow the money... Should I be following whatever came out of someone's colon?"

Why haven't I taken the initiative to clean it? I have thought about it. But, I feel like doing so, would be to take a little of the mystique out of the Tiffany Network.

It's our newsroom's dirty little secret. Everybody knows it's there, but no one ever talks about it... Just like at CNN where everyone knows Anderson Cooper's gay, but nobody ever talks about that.


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