Bathroom Stall Anxiety
This post is about human waste, and as such, there’s a page break for the squeamish. I also don’t want it smeared all over my front page. Awww! I did it anyway.
God, this post is awful, don’t read it.
I’ve no problem using public toilets and urinals. Etiquette still applies to how and when to use the correct urinal when another one along the wall is occupied. And unlike “shitbrick” from the American Pie movies, I have no problem using the stall for public- or work-poopin’ .
What I do have a problem with is if I know there is someone else within two stalls of my own stall of choice – not just one, but two – then I will walk out of the bathroom, risk colon cancer, and poop in another place at another time.
As a kid, I would try to identify the school-poopers by their shoes. I would never call out those that I positively ID’d, but I would have a private smug moment as they walked by in which I knew they were poopin’ at school. Doing this has warped my adult life of pooping, especially at work. I see these people everyday, and they could potentially positively ID me as a work-pooper! Perish the thought right?!
Then there are the poorly-placed toilets. The way the bathroom at work is constructed, starting from the entrance, there are a couple of urinals, the most horribly placed toilet stall, a corner and the rest of the bathroom with more stalls and urinals in a more sane configuration. There are three sides of walkable area around this stall. I can abide at most two – the front, and a single side because brother, sometimes you just have to take the stall on the end.
This “whipping-stall” is also the worst stall in the bathroom because it is directly next to the most popular urinal. The aforementioned urinals are one of regular height, and a shorter one, so nearly everyone uses the regular height urinal, and if the urinal is occupied, you have to walk past the “Frank Lloyd Wrong” stall on two sides.
I must be like a cat I guess. No one must know that I’m pooping. In public, I will not let a bomb drop if I know someone is in earshot, or I will wait for them to flush their toilet or urinal and hide my splash signature in their noise. When I was in junior high school, when I was finished with my lunch, I would ask permission to go to the band hall. The bathroom there was directly across the office and I didn’t want them to know I was usin’ it for poopin’ so I conditioned myself to poop as quickly as possible, wash my hands and step out in less than 2 minutes. I would time myself with a watch and at my peak performance, I would get to less than 60 seconds. I figure anything faster than that was a physical impossibility because some actions like hand-washing and placing strips of paper on the seat first.
When I was kid, I needed to use the bathroom, but knowing better than to just barge in to a bathroom with its door closed, I knocked first. Probably the the quickess, loudest and rudest response I can fathom:
Go away!
From my dad. Apparently being insecure about poopin’ is the way to act? Okay, Dad! Thanks for the lesson! It’s popular to blame one’s parents for faults, but I’ll just say I’m a little weird in a lot of areas, and today it’s poopin’.
Tags: band, bathrool, creepy, Dad, espionage, gross, movie, Music, parents, poop, race car, school, shit, smug, stall, urinal, work
May 28th, 2009 at 2:34 pm
hey this is a very interesting article!
June 12th, 2009 at 1:13 pm
I second the Frank Loyd Wrong comment, and would never use that stall either