We gathered in the conference room as usual, though P was nowhere to be found. We left a note on her chair that there was a meeting going on in the room we'd originally planned, letting her know where we had moved to. So we passed congo bars around and chatted, and no one had the traditional disgusting story to bring up. We ended up rehashing old ones instead, M's story about the chair of cockroaches, and one intern's story about her boyfriend's trip to the emergency room. Sort of a greatest hits of disgusting party stories.

Forty-five minutes into the party, still no P, we started to get worried. It's not like her to just to take off in the middle of the day, or skip out on someone's party. And at the end of last year, she'd had a scare where she had chest pains and the paramedics were called -- turned out it was just work stress, nothing serious -- but we were concerned all the same, when she didn't show.

We wrapped up the party and headed back. As I came into the copyediting area a few people were clustered around the entrance to P's cube. Someone said as she walked up, "Are we all here because we're talking to P?"

"No," came the explanation. "We're here noticing all the signs that she expected to come back."

And we started listing all the evidence for that, like people who have read too much detective fiction:

"Computer on. Glasses."

"Note, still on the chair."

"Blues," R pointed at the roughly bound booklet in the middle of the desk. Blues tend to have a tight turnaround, so one usually doesn't just leave them half done.

"Vegetables not eaten," in a small tupperware on a stack of books in the corner.

"Sneakers."

"Her bag's under there," someone pointed below the stand holding her unabridged dictionary.

"I found her," called A from her cube. We looked up to see P coming down the hall, purse slung over her shoulder.

We dispersed from the scene of the investigation. "Yeah, we weren't worried," said R as she returned to her cube, next to P's.

P stopped by A's cube on her way to her own. "Is the party over already?"

"Oh ..." A said, remembering. "It's my fault, I forgot she said she was going to be late."

"I had an appointment at 2:00," P explained. "Sorry I missed it."

Later, she sent an email to the department, apologizing again for missing the festivities, and she had had a really good disgusting story, too, "involving me, a swimming pool skimmer basket, and a dead skunk. But now I will probably never get to tell it. Too bad ... Maybe next time."

THE LADIES' ROOM -- haven't you always wanted to know about the ladies' room in my office? -- the ladies' room recently got a set of new faucets.

We used to have the kind where you push it down and it pops back up again, turning the water off after a set time. This worked mostly OK, inasfar as those kinds of faucets ever do, except the one on the far right (out of four), had a tendency to get stuck and never turn off. This was, of course, the most popular sink, being the closest to the door. Most of the time, you could get it to shut off by lifting the handle manually, but most people didn't bother, so it just stayed on for maybe hours at a time.

The sink to the left of that one, had a slow drain. For the longest time, the soap dispenser on the far-right sink was empty and didn't get refilled, so this was the most popular sink for a while, and there was often a small pool of water at the bottom of it.

The leftmost two sinks worked fine, but the lighting fixture above that half of the sink counter was out.

Anyway, new faucets. The rightmost one, at first, was replaced with the kind of faucet that you see in kitchen sinks, where you just lift the handle for water, push it down again to turn it off. Then the others were changed, too.

This morning, there was a note taped to the mirror between the two right sinks; it was written on printer paper in black sharpie, on the back of a note about a "small flood in the ladies' room, facilities called." It read, "YOU MUST SHUT OFF," with "THANKS" scrawled diagonally underneath.

The writer of the note, having realized that the right-hand edge of the paper was coming up fast, had squeezed the "SHUT" into the first line, closing up the U so that it almost formed an O instead. Somehow this seemed very appropriate to my dead-dog book.

HAD LUNCH WITH G after work. As we walked away from my office, he pointed across the street and said "It's those people again. Are they always here?"

I looked, and he was pointing at a weird vehicle on Tremont Street, sort of like a bicycle-built-for-six. It's this big frame with multiple seats, everyone facing into the middle, each one working pedals in different directions, but one person (I assume), steers the whole contraption. It was moving slowly along the street.

"Huh," I said. "That's only the second time I've ever seen something like that."

"Me too, but the last time I saw it, it was exactly there, on that part of the street."

"Oh, when I saw it, it was over there," I waved my arm toward State Street. I think it's possible to rent these things if you have a small group, and see Boston that way, or something like that. G seemed to agree it was a plausible explanation.

"Anyway, it is sort of a genius idea," G said.

"To have a huge bike that moves very slowly?"

"Yeah, that, and ..."

"Where half the people are facing backward, and they're in front of the person facing forward, so no one can see where they're going?"

"Yes, and on a main thoroughfare in the city," he said.

"Yeah, that is kind of genius."

"There's a name for it," I suddenly remembered. Last time I ran into one, it was with J, and she'd said, "Oh look, a ____ ___."

"I suspect there's a name for a lot of things," G said. I had to admit this was true. "Doesn't stop me from being impressed that someone knows it, though."

"She's the kind of person who knows that kind of thing."