Adventures in Defecation

What is up with people who flush the toilet or the urinal before using it? Now I’m not talking about the times where there are no other ones available. Sometimes when you’re at a sports event, for instance, stalls are at a premium. You can’t afford to find a better one. But no. These people settle in before the urinal and flush it once before using it. Gross! I would just find a different urinal. I don’t even want to think what the people who flush the toilet see before they go, but yet, they do it anyways. That would really ick me out. Sure we’re all pooping where someone else had pooped, or peeing into the same ceramic receptacle, but somehow there’s a world of difference between knowing that fact and being confronted with recent, visual evidence of it. No, rings around the bowl are not the same. Not even urine stains on the wall are sufficiently nasty. Seeing someone else’s by-product there in the bowl, looking up at you is enough to make me find a different place to go. Why isn’t it enough to gross out these people? Do they have no sense of bathroom honor or what?

When I’m at work or out somewhere and I have to go, I’m always afraid of entering a stall while someone’s using it. So that’s why I test the door, look in real quick, and only then do I go inside. It’s weird, because I’m not afraid of someone busting in on me — they’d be embarrassed, not me. It’s my stall, not theirs. They’d be the stall invader. I’d just be chagrined for a second or two, and then I’d laugh about the look on their face later.

But busting in on someone else would be living a nightmare. I’d fumble with the handle, immediately avert my eyes (and hope they weren’t burning because of what I saw), mumble something apologetic, and then look for another stall. If there wasn’t another stall, I’d have to leave the bathroom. I sure couldn’t hang around and risk seeing that guy again, knowing that kind of stuff about him.

It’d be one of those psychologically scalding moments. I wonder how many people are in therapy this very moment because they accidentally saw someone else taking a dump?