Brendan Gates

We have a smoker hut at my office. It’s a small steel structure in the middle of the parking lot, not much more than a corrugated roof on four 10 foot poles. Since our building is non-smoking, and you can’t smoke within 20 or 30 feet of the building entrance, our smokers use this hut to be protected from the sun or rain whilst they smoke a square. Also in the hut are one or two ashtrays.

Anyway, our security guard has taken it upon himself to start cleaning the butts out of the ashtrays during his shift, and gone so far as to to purchase a kitty litter sift scoop for this purpose. His objection to the butts is not driven by some sort of cleanliness OCD or sanitation fetish, though. The used butts were attracting bums who wanted to salvage one or two last puffs from the discarded cigs. Since there were often also employees in the hut at the same time, whom the security guard was tasked with protecting, this was obviously a problem. Hence the kitty litter scoop. No available butts meant no scavenging bum bait.

However, what it did apparently mean was retaliation. Twice now, since the butts have been cleaned out, we’ve found human poop in the smoker hut. Retaliatory poops, we can only assume. Since that would be the obvious course of action. I know if somebody removed my source of free used cigarettes, then my first thought would be to poop on their property somewhere.

If there is an upside to these fecal finds, then hopefully they will mean a decrease in the amount of poop we find in the stairwell for our parking garage across the street. I can’t imagine that presumably underfed bums would have enough ammo to hit us from both sides. Sort of a zero sum poop equation.

It is also important to note that when walking out of the parking garage stairwell and towards our lot (where the smoker hut is), you have to pass by a public bathroom. A free, public, bathroom that is cleaned daily. It’s about 15 feet from the stairwell and 90 feet from the smoker hut. Fantastic.