Fact #4689542 about me: I loathe public washrooms.

When I was in high school, I refused to use the school washrooms. I knew that they were cleaned daily, but it didn’t matter. After witnessing countless numbers of female students standing on the toilet seats to adjust their kilts in the giant bathroom mirror, I decided that they’d never be clean enough. (This often meant “holding it in” for seven or eight hours a day while I was in class… How my bladder survived, I may never know.) Fast forward to the present. In our shiny new office here in the west end of Toronto, amidst rooms with lavish leather chairs, multiple kitchens, and pristine boardrooms, there is one major problem: We only have one Ladies’ Room.

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That’s a line I hear a lot. Usually it’s the response I get right after people ask me how I’m putting my six years of post-secondary education to good use, and I tell them that I’m an intern. “Well,” they say, looking extra-sympathetic, “everyone has to start somewhere.”

For me, this “somewhere” isn’t just the fourth floor of a freezing cold office in the west end of the city. It’s a place where life as I’ve come to know (and love) it, is undergoing some major changes. Great changes. Exciting changes. Scare-the-crap-right-out-of-you changes.

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