On the door of the giant handicapped stall in the men’s room on my office floor, there’s a big hand-written sign that says:

“OUT” of ORDER!

I am fine with the hand-written sign. I am even fine with the fact that, magically, they have managed to lock the door from the inside, which secures me from accidentally walking into the stall and viewing whatever horror has rendered the toilet “OUT” of ORDER. I have endured enough visits to bathrooms where the simple act of opening a stall door became a journey through mind-bending horror.

You need to understand, I am not poop-averse. This is not to say I revel in it, or that I actively seek it out; rather, it merely says that I understand that it is a natural biological process that is occasionally fraught with misfortune, and I am prepared to sometimes contend with the aftereffects of these. Shit happens, in the most literal way, and you can most of the time just blink and move on.

I don’t know if it’s the water, though, or some additive that the cafeteria ladies contribute to the coffee, but I have witnessed nightmares in this building’s bathrooms that defy both natural biology and human sanity. They are the kind of sights that have you look away and then look again, to confirm if what you saw really was as awful as– oh Christ, yes, yes it was, how the hell do you get out of there.

But I don’t wish to dwell — my memory is too vivid and my mental health is too fragile to give this more thought than it deserves. My point is that I do not want anyone thinking that I am ungrateful for accurate, complete signage regarding the relative performance and function of our plumbing facilities.

No, let’s look at it again and see if you can figure out why I’m confused.

“OUT” of ORDER!

Why are there quotation marks around OUT? What does that mean? What is subtly being implied?

Is there hilarious wordplay at work, here? Is the “OUT” referring to the process most generally involved with visiting the bathroom stall? And then implying that “OUT”age was so excessive as to result in the damaging — or indeed destruction — of an entire toilet?

Is it meant as emphasis, as in, “Stay out of this stall, and we don’t mean right now, we mean for all of eternity”? Or perhaps even, “OUT — OUT of the bathroom NOW, don’t ask QUESTIONS, just GO!”

An acronym? Our Usual Toilet? Outhouse Unfortunately Trashed?

It can’t simply be grammatical laziness, because why would someone who is too lazy to write properly go to extra lengths to add punctuation to a sign telling me to stay out of a shitter? It is too baffling, too odd, too mysterious to be something as simple as that.

No.

There are forces at work in the seventh floor water closet. And they disturb me.