False quality

I stopped at a convenience store today to get something to drink and to use the restroom.  Oh, the restroom... what a room that was.  On the mirror over the sink was a sign saying that if the restroom wasn't clean to contact management because they wanted only quality restrooms.  A quick survery showed stains of coke drips all over the inside of the door.  The floor around the toilet was littered with toilet paper.  The sink had not been cleaned in a while because drink stains were all over it.  Water drips appeared all over the floor, not merely around the toilet.  A cardboard core of a roll of toilet paper was uncurled and half-floated near the bottom of the water in the toilet bowl.  Plaster splotches adorned the walls of the small room.

I'm not sure why management bothered with the sign on the mirror.  But then, part of the work I do is exactly like this scene - figuratively speaking - so I understand the need to keep up an image.  People's rhetoric is one thing, but if one takes a look around the words that are spoken, such as people's actions, or their words in other circumstances, one finds that the pledge to be a decent person is mere talk, empty words.  I try hard to expose people's stories that don't match their rhetoric.  It's not that hard either, and I have found that people whose lives don't match their rhetoric are habitually out of kilter.  If I were to stop at this convenience store again, I am quite certain that nothing will have changed.

It was a good snapshot to remind me, coming into a new year, that people live behind images created by words, their facades, and surveying the environment will bear out the emptiness of the words being used.