Excuse me for using the Australian term for the bathroom. The way people misuse restroom facilities irks me. It’s on my top ten pet peeve list.
I ended my work week with a flood coming from a locked maintenance closet in a men’s restroom. The brackish water emanating from under that door ruined new carpeting on the lobby and leaked down a stairwell into the floor below, not to mention seeping under office doorways. We were forced to evacuate the building in the rain and disable the elevators to avoid an electrical hazard. Places that harbor water or waste should be respected and handled with more care.
Not all people take that idea to heart, unfortunately. Of all places to desecrate, religious buildings and bathrooms tend to get an unfair share. There is nothing more disheartening than entering a bathroom and having to peer into two or more stalls before finding one good enough to use. This is the most evident after a weekend, when maintenance crews may not clean as often. I have seen seats left uninhabitable, and I pity the cleaning crew who has to deal with it.
Maybe certain people are annoyed by the fact that they have to set their genitals over a hole in a seat and evacuate waste. Sure, we’d all rather be elsewhere, but the few minutes it takes to “go” are not so bad in retrospect. In fact, I can come up with some positive things to say about going to the bathroom:
1) Be glad you can go. I know people with problems like diarrhea and constipation or bladder infections who wish they could just go normally.
2) If you’re home, you can take a moment to read. Come on, you all know you keep some reading somewhere near the toilet.
3) If you’re at work, it’s a break you’re entitled to. Of course, smoking or cell phone use is no longer allowed in most restrooms, but do you really want to multitask on the toilet? Like the late George Carlin said, bathrooms are like elevators, in that there’s really nothing for you to do while you’re there. It’s a mindless activity that at least gets you away from the cubicle.
4) American bathrooms, for all the misuse, are among the best in the world. Some countries still use squatting holes over trenches (I’ll never get the image of the toilets in Slumdog Millionaire out of my mind).
I don’t know what I would do if I caught somebody leaving a bathroom stall without policing their activities. I’m afraid I would be likely to speak up and kindly remind them that they should straighten up the stall before they go. I’d also probably get a response that Ce Lo Green would be proud of, but I feel we all have a right to a positive bathroom experience when not at home.
So how did you leave a public restroom stall last time you had to go?
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