What is WRONG With People?

I feel like our RV park’s housekeeper deserves hazard pay.

I continue to be astonished by some people, and the things that they do. Or in this case, what someone did NOT do.

Someone had an unfortunate case of explosive diarrhea yesterday… In the shower. And got out of the shower, still “leaking,” to reach the toilet. The result was poop all over the shower, poop on the floor, poop all around the toilet. The thing that astounds me is that this person just strolled out, leaving it there. I watched him do it.

We have a camera in the hallway leading to the bathrooms, so I know exactly who it was, and he’s getting a nastygram from me, and maybe a fine. If he had made any attempt, or even called to ask for cleaning-tools ,or help (he has my number), I would feel differently. But he just walked away.

I don’t know why it still astonishes me when someone does that, because (unfortunately, astoundingly) this is far from the first time there has been this sort of mess to deal with. All too often we can’t identify the culprit—the multiple-stalls setup of our other bathrooms means that even a camera outside wouldn’t tell us who went where…

Sometimes we have “serial offenders,” the worst of which was someone who was regularly smearing poop on the stall walls. (In addition to my outrage, I admit to curiosity. I can’t quite picture the logistics, if you will. Did he scoop poop out of the toilet to do this? Catch it in his hand? Did he have gloves for this project, or does someone who decorates with poop not worry about such things?) And above all else, resoundingly: WHY??? What the ever-living fuck makes a person do something like this? Repeatedly!

We had a hypothesis, about the identity of our malefactor, and the incidents did, in fact, stop when that teen’s family moved out of the park. We had better luck with ID-ing a serial offender on the ladies’ side—someone who, on a daily basis, left a clogged toilet full of poop and massively excessive amounts of toilet paper. Ultimately we had a good guess because she did the same at our house, when she was there. So when our housekeeper came upon the daily offering, I texted the offender (what better way to reach a teen!) and told her she was no longer allowed to leave her poop-mess behind. She needed to use less toilet paper, and I would show her how to use a plunger in the event that it happened again. I told her, “It’s not Chrystal’s job to clean up your poop!”

(If only that were true! It shouldn’t have to be Chrystal’s job!)

She apologized, embarrassed to be caught out—but the very next day, there it was again. I came down on her like a ton of bricks (apparently I am “scary”), and it hasn’t happened since.

Lower on the “ick” scale—but as high on our frustration scale—was the mess Jon found in the clubhouse kitchen yesterday. Dishes and pans unwashed, food left in the microwave, trash filled up and not emptied, general mess in the kitchen…

It’s a nice little clubhouse, with couches & a TV, long tables for group eating, and—the big draw for people living and cooking in RVs—a full kitchen. A number of people use it regularly, and lately it has become the hang-out for the whole “gang” of kids living in the park. Some of these kids (in my curmudgeonly opinion) are far too young to be running around without adult supervision (I’ve found two of them, for example, crawling and rolling around in a pile of leaves… in the middle of the road!) and a couple of them are, shall we say, behaviorally challenged even with their adults—so I have been uneasy. (None of them are “bad” kids, and most of them belong to our staff, so I know them… But I’m not confident in their judgment and behavior.)

In any case—and this one is probably not on the kids—the mess in the kitchen is far from the first time. Chrystal has cleaned up far too much of other people’s kitchen-use, and yesterday Jon decided “Enough.” The clubhouse has had a keypad-doorknob, with the same number-code as the bathrooms—but yesterday Jon changed it out for a doorknob with a key, and we made a sign-out sheet for the office. There’s still no charge to use the clubhouse, but we’ll have a registry of who has used it. If there’s a mess, now, we’ll know whom to go to. If there should be any “repeat offenders,” we can decline to let them continue using it. And that key is only going to adults.

It frustrates me that we should have to do this.

And I don’t understand it. Never mind the extremes like poop-smearing—I don’t understand the mind of someone who uses a communal kitchen and walks away from their dirty pans.

What are they thinking? I literally want to know what they’re thinking. Do they think it’s someone’s job to clean the kitchen after them? Do they think … What else? I’m trying to think what else they might think, that would explain walking away from their mess.

I guess it really doesn’t matter what they’re thinking—the point is what they’re doing. The point is what some people will do when there’s no one there to make them behave properly. Every few days, in the summer, for example, Jon has to repair something damaged by poor RV-driving, and it’s a rarity for anyone to stop and admit they’ve hit and damaged property. So I suppose my real question is: what on earth is WRONG with people?