That's not water......not that I would clean it up anyway

I have a confession to make. Well, actually it’s not really a confession for me, but more of a confession for the entire male species. Here it goes. Sometimes, although very rare, we pee on the floor. There, I said it; pretty disgusting, I know. Despite all the male bravado surrounding our ability to pee standing up, the fact of the matter is that by standing up, one is farther away from the bowl, and the farther away you get from the bowl; the larger the margin of error is. It’s simple math and physics. We obviously don’t do it on purpose or anything like that, but occasionally there are factors beyond our control; splashing, angled streams, and of course the completely unpredictable double stream; hard to stop, impossible to control. In the end, we just plain miss.

I’m sure our ancestors might think this pretty humorous, and even be somewhat appalled that we put the toilet in the house in the first place. They were smart enough to put the toilets outside of the house, or at least have a designated spot or tree farther away from the village. Leave it to a modern society obsessed with convenience and anything that allows us to be lazier, to move the toilet inside the dwelling. Granted, I have no inclination to move it back outside, I rather enjoy the modern convenience. I just find it funny that if you are outside, you have to go inside in order to use the facilities, just to have the septic system pump it back outside.

Even more humorous is the tendency of people in the US to insist on having labels like bathroom, washroom, or restroom, as if by naming it something else, you can cover up the completely natural, yet very unclean nature of the room. If I’m out and about, in need of a rest, I’ll look for a bench to sit down on, and at no point will I consider taking a nap in a nice smelly, dirty, restroom that most likely has pee on the floor, as a feasible option. At least in British speaking countries, they’re honest enough to just plain call it the toilet. No hiding anything there.

I’m getting a little off the subject now though. The reason I brought this up is because the bathrooms at my place of employment (which contain no actual baths) are quite possibly the most abhorrent I’ve ever seen. Even though I work at a Fortune 500 company that constantly ranks amongst the best places to work in the country, I’m often disgusted when entering the men’s washroom. It isn’t the same type of disgusting nature found at restrooms in Union Station, Washington DC, though, or my parents’ house back in WI. Those places suffer from lack of care, which allows the grime to deposit day after day, stacking up week after week. The restrooms at work, are actually cleaned at least twice a day, which can lead to a different kind of dirtiness. Instead of all the grime melding into an indiscernible layer of filth, every little speck now shines out in contrast of the cleanliness of the floor. The amount that accumulates during the brief times between cleanings is a true testament of the utter disregard for the use of public space.

One day not to long ago, for example, there was a distinctive yellow liquid on top of the urinal. On top of it! That just doesn’t make sense. You’d have to either be very tall, or actually pointed up in order to pull that off. More importantly, it’d be incredibly hard not to notice your error. You don’t miss a urinal with out being fully aware of it. I would assume that a reasonable person would at least make some effort to amend their mistake. I know I would grab some toilet paper from one of the stalls and wipe it up. Isn’t that just common courtesy? Then again, you know what happens when you assume.

One explanation I had for this apparent lack of respect for your fellow bathroom dwellers is has to do with the large number of engineers employed at my office. Putting that many dorky guys from a discipline not known for excellent hand eye coordination in one place is bound to increase the number of aiming accidents.

After further consideration, however, that hypothesis didn’t quite hold up. For one thing, despite the number of dorky engineers we have on our campus, there are also a disproportionate number of active, athletic, and potentially coordinated ones. More so, even the most uncoordinated poor soul can improve his ability with some practice. I’d think that the repetitive nature of using the bathroom on a daily basis would allow ample time to improve one’s aim before reaching adult hood.

In the end, it just comes down to a matter of responsibility, an issue that is plaguing our society. People increasingly seem to have the attitude that if it’s not their assigned task, they shouldn’t do it. Perhaps more importantly, there’s the perception that if you can’t get caught for something, then it’s apparently not wrong. During lunch hours it’s not uncommon to see food spilled in the corridors leading between buildings. I once even saw an entire tray spilled across the carpeting. No where in sight was there a person hurrying back with a fistful of napkins to take care of their mess. Instead, it was just left there to soak in, and make people step across.

Why is it that people no longer take responsibility for their actions? Could it be that there’s a slight sense of empowerment achieved by knowing that someone else is there to do your dirty work, allowing yourself to focus on what you consider the “important” stuff. Maybe these traits are just magnified in the work place, where people are more in the mindset of “this is what I’m here to do.”

Of course there’s also the distinct possibility the people are just plain lazy. Unfortunately, that may lie at the root of this problem. Laziness maybe the mother of innovation, but she also births many other bastard children who run loose terrorizing the neighborhood, possessing no aspirations beyond becoming crackwhores and maybe someday, if they’re lucky, getting that big screen TV.

Oh, by the way. Apparently aiming isn’t just an issue in men’s bathrooms; women’s bathrooms have issues also.