Filed under:Uncategorized — posted by Administrator on March 3, 2003 @ Mar 03, 03 | 6:43 am
When I was a kid, public restrooms were places you found at parks and beaches, and were usually mostly clean, and had toilet paper about half the time. You could usually count on gas stations, although they sometimes made you carry out something like a license plate or a crank shaft with a little key hanging off of it so that you would bring the thing back when you were done. The “out-house” style latrines found while out camping were expected to be a bit worse, but still stocked. You were roughing it, so if they happened to be out of TP, well then you snuck outside and grabbed a copy of the trail map brochure they conveniently posted nearby in the little “TAKE ONE” box.
The point here is, when I was a kid, public restrooms were places that you wouldn’t visit unless you had too, but they they were reasonably safe, well kept services that you would trust a five year-old to walk into and have a private dump while you patiently waited outside. If you were at the park, and one of your kids was doing the bladder waddle (if you have kids, then you know what I’m talking about), then you could send him or her off alone to the bathroom while the other stayed and played on the monkey bars. You simple didn’t worry about it.
But no longer.
In this day and age of full automation and advanced medicinal technology, it’s almost a given that unless you live in a gated community that has the word “Club” in their name somewhere, having TP in a public restroom has about a 20% likelihood. You pretty much have to walk past the guy who fills those things in order to be certain that you won’t end up using the sandpaper-like towels they sometimes provide to dry your hands instead.
And you don’t even consider sending your child into one of those places unless you’ve done a full reconnoitering yourself first, just to be sure there isn’t some drunken homeless guy in there peeing into the sink.
People just don’t care about how they leave those places anymore. It was just starting to get bad when I was a lad, but it’s reached critical mass now. I was at a convention recently and had the misfortune of having to use one of the on-site restrooms in what was then being touted as Pittsburgh’s new gleaming high-tech convention center. Aside from the fact that I had to walk about a half mile just to get to the bathrooms (architects should have to live for three months in their own creations…), they were a disgusting mess! The worst part was that the group I was with, who were the ones putting on the conference, was actually paying for this service. There was yellow and green water all over the floor, about three sheets of TP for the whole ten-stall room and no towels anywhere in the convention center. No working dryers either. So much for high-tech. We mentioned the towel problem to the maintenance staff wandering around with nothing to do, and they told us they couldn’t keep up with the usage. The convention center was nowhere near capacity, and it’s not like we were telling people to go and fill up their freebie bags with the things. How many brain cells does it take to leave an extra package of towels near the sink along with a stacked roll or two of TP? I guess that’s why they’re working as a janitors and not for NASA. Hey, don’t get me wrong here though. I’m not just making a social disclaimer when I say that I appreciate what janitors do. They don’t get paid nearly enough to have to deal with all the literal kaka that we toss their way. And I tell them so. As much as I love to complain, I also reward people who do a job well, whether it be fixing my car, waiting my table, or putting together a stellar looking brochure.
Anyway, the whole thing came to a head the other day (sorry about that) when my little girl informed me at the park that she needed to use the “pottie.” The proper politically correct procedure when an adult male has a female child with a need to pee, is to take them into the adult’s bathroom, and NOT the other way around. Fine, but tell that to the child, who is just starting to appreciate the fact that she is a girl, and that girls use the “ladies” room (which has the stick figure with the skirt, and not that other door showing the naked figure). We argued about it for maybe five minutes, during which time my stress level went from calm to rolling boil because I just knew that any second now she was going to loose that still-new control she had over her bladder and wet the only change of clothing I had with me that day. I usually carry a spare change of clothes in the car, just in case she ‘forgets’ to inform me in time while we’re stuck in traffic or arguing at the park. But on that sunny afternoon, I knew with dread certainty that the only clothing still in my vehicle would fit her about as well as trying to shove a GI Joe into a Barbie outfit.
Finally, and for reasons that only another child understands, she completely changed her mind and we walked into the bathroom… Only to walk right back out again a moment later because the place was so awful that it would have been infinitely more sanitary to simply squat out on the grass someplace. There wasn’t a chance in hell that I was going to let her sit her fanny anywhere in that bathroom, no matter how badly she needed to take a leak, and surprisingly, she agreed. We made a beeline for the car and by some small miracle, made it home without incident.
Now, I don’t know if women’s restrooms suffer from the same lack of common cleanliness, but this place was just sick. And I’m an American male! We’re the same sub-human species that thinks nothing of the puddle of sticky yellow urine that their standing in while they blast away in front of a urinal. We piss on our own boots while camping and blame the “wet grass”. Some of us even think it’s funny to light our own farts. I’ll save you the details and just say that I was offended on multiple levels, and a little frightened that there were people out there that would still actually sit down and take a dump in such a fetid sewer as this place was.
But the amazing thing is that this was the ‘nice’ park, not the closer and smaller park near our house that the drug dealers use. This was the out-of-the-way park with the cut grass and the soft bark around the playground equipment instead of sand. this was the park in the ‘nice’ neighborhood! How could it get like this?
And as I thought about it, I understood that it wasn’t the groundskeepers. They probably only came around once or twice a week at most, and they had a pattern; a tried and true routine that had them meticulously clean this and replace that with the calculated clockwork efficiency of an nuclear reactor. No, it was some patron to the place that had left it in such a foul state, and it was this fact that had me sweating. Something had changed in the last two decades that made it ‘acceptable’ to leave a restroom in such a state. That something was walking around out there and very well might be dating my precious little girl in another nine or ten years. And what would the public restrooms look like by then?! It was the stuff of nightmares!
My only hope is that I can do my part to reverse the effects of the last generation’s social ineptitude and teach my daughter to have the ‘common courtesies’ that were taught to me as a child, or even more so. Either that or hope that we can colonize Mars by then, because this place is going down the toilet. (more…)