Poor sanitation in some bathrooms at CDC, exellent in others. What does this say about us?

In the old buildings of Clifton Road Campus (1--6), janitorial services have been reduced from daily cleaning during the working week to every-other day over the past year. I'm not sure what was the evidence-base of this move -- bacterial counts on the toilet, density of urine stains on the floor in the men's rooms, or paper towel overflow rates around the trash cans? In any case, helpful notices were posted on the mirrors with phone numbers to call if the user found sanitarily unacceptable conditions.

First, I would like to point out that since the switch to the every-other-day regimen, bathroom sanitation has become an embarrassment. Stains of various shades of brown adorn the insides of the toilet bowels, the poorly flushing toilets retain fistfulls of spotted toilet paper, and you can make a ready guess at what your deputy or supervisor had for dinner last night, based on the odors that persist because of the poor ventilation and absence of fresheners. Try the toilet on the 6th floor in building 1 -- it hasn't flushed properly for a year despite all those phone calls I made -- it's a gem of retention. Paper towels are strewn on the floors around the trash recepticles.

Second, I've noticed in my peregrinations through the expanding CDC campus that not all bathrooms (or their users) are mistreated equally. Though I have not inquired of building services, nor formally surveyed the janitorial staff, I've noticed no every-other-day notices in buildings 16, 19 or 21. And the really attractive conditions in the bathrooms of those buildings -- pleasingly polished urinals, no soiled toilet paper floating in the bowels, functioning sinks -- ah, its a different world, folks. Somehow you get the feeling that the people in these buildings aren't faced on any old Tuesday and Thursday (janitorial off-days in the slums) with evidence that someone on their floor badly needs a colonoscopy.

Alright, some of us have to live in cubicles while others have corner offices, and during the past few years I've made my peace with the power structure grabbing reserved parking while the rest of us get some of our required exercise walking between car and office (though I do remember, as a young PHA a very long time ago, strolling up to the office with the then-director who had parked next to me in the far-back reaches of the parking lot -- neither he nor I thought such a chat under such circumstances unusual, back then -- imagine!). But is it really necessary to to extend the galloping hierarchical institutional differentiation to the upkeep standards of the toilet stalls?