Friday, April 15, 2005

THE STATE OF THINGS

Little has changed at The Middletown Press in the four-plus years I’ve been gone, including the broken toilet seat in the upstairs men’s room. The $20 expense, apparently, would have eaten into the bottom line (so to speak) of the Journal Register Co. paper too much.

But the bumper sticker adhered to the stall door has been modified delightfully. It used to say “Vacation Connecticut: We’re full of surprises,” although someone had long ago added “and taxes” to the slogan.

Now someone’s crossed out “full of surprises” and written in a revision. “Vacation Connecticut: We’re,” the new version says, “between Boston and New York.”

By the way, if the Journal Register Co. is shamed into springing for a new toilet seat, perhaps it could make up for years of neglect by buying the Press a Galactika, a transparent seat with lights inside. “At its first exhibition [the seat] was a very big sensation,” says the entrepreneurs selling the “long-awaited” device. “That’s no miracle, as we entered a terrain which bored us all” for a long time.

Like Connecticut, if despairingly witty bumper sticker vandals are to be believed.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

"long awaited" is not a good PR move.

Anonymous said...

Believe me, the broken toilet seat in Middletown rates as a mere nuisance when compared with the men's room at Bristol.

The facilities, which were finally upgraded in February, once included unfinished concrete walls, no insulation and no floor beyond the bare plywood that had clearly been installed when the building was constructed in the late 1890s. Add big spider webs in the corners and a collection of dead bugs in the window sill that would rival that of the American Museum of Natural History, and you had one fine lavatory experience.

As for Middletown, my favorite aspect of the upstairs facilities is the "Welcome to Ireland" sticker atop the urinal plumbing. It's been there for as long as I can remember.

Here's hoping for the Galactika.

Scape7 said...

I vaguely remember visiting the Bristol property, but I wasn't sure if it was my own memories or something I saw in that Kurt Russell movie, "Escape from Bristol."