All Hail the Porcelain God

3/15/06

What in the name of all that is holy is the matter with men? Now, I am loathe to bash my own gender, but seriously…what the fuck? For the purposes of keeping this diatribe down to a digestible size I wish to focus on my sex's curiously bad behavior in the single men's restroom we have at work. There's a women's room, too, but due to a court order I'm not allowed near it. I'm picturing something akin to the Garden of Eden, complete with a waterfall and little bunnies with white gloves that dab your privates dry while butterflies whisper how pretty you are and ask you if you've lost weight.

Let us try to forget for a moment the dubious wisdom of having a single bathroom with one paltry urinal and two stalls (one of which is perpetually backed up due to people, I dunno, pooping concrete or whatever) in an office with some hundred and twenty employees on shift at any given time.

The first thing one is struck by upon entering our modern day outhouse is the fact that everything is wet. Not damp…wet. Like a cave. The area around the sink and especially the wall upon which the soap dispenser is located looks like the victim of an impromptu water balloon fight.

Along the same lines but infinitely more disturbing is that fact that all the toilets are wet, too. I can deal with the fact that some people, possibly lacking arms, don't want to lift up the ring. It seems odd, but after all, urine is sterile and it's not so tough to give the seat a once-over with TP before applying your butt. What I can't fathom is how a grown human, with opposable thumbs and everything, can miss the gaping maw of a fixed urinal. I could be sympathetic if randomly, every third customer or so, the urinal just sort of spun madly without warning or shot up to the ceiling, or it was like one of those midway games where you had to fill up the clown's mouth with your fleshy pee-canon (actually that sounds kind of neat!) but no, it's like hand grenades; you just have to get close. These bastions of aiming skill with whom I whittle away 40 hours a week have apparently forgone the idea completely and taken to pissing with their eyes closed, gyrating in place to imaginary disco music and just generally marking the whole region with their piddle. And joy of joys, you get to stand in it while you go! There has to be an awful lot of floor-pissing to turn the tiles in a 3-year-old building muted yellow. Gross.

And now, ladies and gentlemen, we come to the most mind-boggling and spine-liquefying horror of all. Those with a strong gag reflex be forewarned.

While standing at the urinal one is treated to modern art the likes of which would make Oscar the Grouch queasy. Not only is there a freakish amount of pubic hair on the lip of and inside the urinal, it's also randomly plastered against the three walls that surround you. And I'm not talking about your run-of-the-mill, short little meat-and-potatoes pubes, either. We're talking like mutant strains of uber-pubes up to several inches long. If you saw these pubes on the street you'd be afraid they were going to mug you, okay? I pity the women who have to sleep next to Sasquatch and that shag carpet covering his privates. Maybe that's why they can't hit the urinal; they can't find their penis to aim inside the thatch of black forest. And these pubes are everywhere, as if people have been plucking and just gluing them to the ambiance like some disgusting bulletin board.

Oh, and sometimes these guys use the wall as their own personal Kleenex, just to break up the tedium of staring at plastered pubes.

Clearly, one feels dirty after exposure to this lavatory of shame, and might want to wash their hands. Here, too, we run into issues. Besides the aforementioned dripping wetness everywhere, the soap is probably empty and if by some stroke of chance it has a few encrusted crystals around the nozzle you can chip off and moisten into a crude lather, there aren't going to be paper towels. Well, to be fair, there will be paper towels, but because the guy who refilled them was too lazy to open the dispenser and the rest of the men are savages, said package of towels now resembles something gotten at by a rabid pack of wolverines. It's…it's just twenty degrees of fucked up is what it is. I've started shitting in the alley.

There are those who might like to point out here (Hanni, I'm looking in your direction) that my home bathroom is not exactly a temple of cleanliness, but I think even those of you goodly enough to have visited my home will agree it in no way approaches the Herculean feats of foulness described above.