In the bathroom where I work the ceiling is made up of modular ceiling tiles. You know the kind; pale, cheap and made of some sort of proprietary combination of drywall and carcinogens. They’re the tiles that make you want to throw a pencil into and watch dangle against gravity above you.
For the last few months one of these ceiling tiles has been pushed askew. At some point a maintenance worker must have pushed it aside in order to get at the electrical work that’s up there. When he was done he left it out of it’s designated slot, allowing you to see the coils of wire running this way and that, some red, some green, some blue, all snaking off different ways to their destinations. This electrical world would ordinarily be hidden from view by the artificial ceiling created by the tiles below it.
But because this maintenance worker left this single ceiling tile exposed for whatever reason– perhaps because of neglect, perhaps because of an accident, perhaps because of a controlled substance – for the last month we’ve been able to peek into the hidden world a few feet above our heads.
At first when I noticed this off-kilter ceiling tile it didn’t bother me. I assumed that the maintenance worker would return from his controlled substance adventure, finish his work, and the single askew tile would return to its rightful grid along with the others. But as the days wore on, I worried more and more that the maintenance worker wouldn’t be back and that every time one went into the bathroom we would be confronted by a black square looming above us. Though none of us talked about it, surely most everyone noticed it. Eventually we came to accept that this would be the new world that we had to live in. Days went by. Then weeks. After two months of looking at it every time I went to the bathroom I had tuned it out. Soon it fell into the background, a part of the noise that your brain edits out of the movie that it’s always filming.
Until one day I noticed it again. Washing my hands in the mirror I was aware of a dark spot over my shoulder. For the first time in months I looked at where the tile had been moved over. It was a one foot by one foot square of absence, punctuated by a corner of the tile that still poked into the black frame.
Why had no one bothered to fix it? Other maintenance men have been in and out of that bathroom to do other things. Dozens of people went in there every day. I myself had noticed it for months. But since the tile was like that when we all got there it wasn’t our problem to fix it.
In the end, it didn’t take much. All I needed was a stepstool and a broomstick to move it back into place. It was awkward and little carcinogenic particles sprinkled down as I nudged it. Now it stands square to his friends that cover the rest of the bathroom, shoulder to shoulder.
There was no fanfare. For all I know I was the only one who ever noticed it. But I don’t do what I do for the glory or the fame. I’m just an ordinary man, like you.
[Photo Credit: Reddit]
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