Stranger Encounters: Tally

Excerpt from mail sent in 1993

So this guy shows up at the door of the Berkeley Geoworks office, saying he's "from building engineering" here to "check on the bathrooms."

I let him in and walked him over to the men's room. While there, he took a yellow pad of paper out of his briefcase. He made three tally marks on it, I surmised corresponding to the three assorted toilets and urinals in the men's room. Sneaking a peek at the top sheet of his pad, as near as I could tell it consisted only of tally marks--no notes of any sort, just a count of something. He then left without checking the women's room.

With the retirement of Dave Lucas [the old building manager] is the "building engineering" group finding they don't know how many toilets we have? Or does this guy, who showed no ID nor credential, just have a strange hobby?

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