The Gents' (Singapore)

I was temping at WKM Valves in an office block in Singapore, assigned to two American male bosses who’d decided to rent their own premises after sharing an office and support staff with another company on a different floor. 

    On the first day, I went to the ladies’ loo and found the door locked, so I asked one of my bosses, Larry, who gave me the only key he had.  It was a small room, with a hand basin and urinal area, and a lock-up cubicle beyond that.  

    I used it for days without running into anyone, until one day, I was emerging from the cubicle just as a local Chinese bloke was entering from the outside.  

    He halted abruptly, took a look at me, stepped back to take a look at and above the door (which gave no indication of what it was, not even the fact that it was a toilet) to see if perhaps he was the one who’d wandered into the wrong room, and said, “This is the gents'!”  

    I didn’t know what to say, so I replied simply, “Well, just shut the door after you.”

    Within a few minutes, the manager of the building — a very genial man — turned up at my desk, hesitated for a bit as if not knowing how to broach the subject, then said with an amused smile, “I hear you’ve been using the men’s toilet.”  

    It turned out that it was the toilet for male executives, of which I was neither.  

    My impression from the reaction of the chap I’d encountered earlier was that he was probably more indignant about me using the executives’ toilet as a mere secretary than about me using the men’s toilet as a woman.  

    The manager gave me another key, this time to the Ladies', which had eight cubicles.

    The very next day, in the post arrived a card from Houston, Texas, where Pete (British geologist who’d worked in Conoco Taiwan for a year) was visiting Conoco Houston.

   

    The cover of the card had a hole through which one could see a woman’s side profile, smiling, above which were the words, “I like you…”.  

    Open the card, and inside were the words “…because you are different!”  

    The picture was of the woman, with her back to the reader, standing at a urinal using it, flanked by two men.  

    Pete wouldn't have known about the toilet incident because it'd only happened the previous day, and his card from Houston would’ve been bought and posted at least a week before.

    Talk about uncanny!  Spooky or what??

(Singapore, 1977)