A Treasure Found at Home

there’s an idea out there that men’s public bathrooms are messier and more gross than women’s. i’m not sure i buy it. i’ve seen women’s bathrooms at well-run venues which i’ve been afraid to step into.

anyhow, this isn’t about that bathroom, this is about our work bathroom. a couple weeks ago there was a furiously whispered conference in the hall upstairs between a couple women and our office manager (also a woman). moments later office manager sent an email to all the women in the office, marked private, reminding us to please clean up after ourselves after using the toilet — make sure the protective tissue paper and whatever else is in the bowl flushes.

i almost replied to all asking them to please try to dry up some of the lake of water they leave on the counter top, too, but then thought better of it. that sort of behaviour gets me labeled as “passive aggressive” although WHY anyone thinks directly asking for what you want is passive is beyond me. but, that’s another post.

anyhow, today when i went in there was already someone else in one of the stalls. i went into another and started attending to business when the other person shuffled her clothes, walked out of the stall and then out of the bathroom. and that was all. she didn’t FLUSH! she didn’t wash her hands. she just. walked. out.

now, having known someone who was paranoid of public places (who actively worried about how to get OUT of the bathroom without touching anything and thereby catching a fatal illness) i think i can imagine her thought process. you see, bathrooms are dirty. they have germs all over as evidenced by unflushed toilets and pools of water all over the counter around the sink. what those minds fail to grasp is that if everyone would just sit down and make sure the paper goes in the toilet and flush (with follow up flushes if necessary) and wash their hands and mop up their drips – then the bathroom wouldn’t be a filthy mess!

unrelatedly (or maybe not since it’s frequently left behind – used), i’d like to see the data on how many germs that tissue paper actually blocks.