Editorials Archive
Restrooms have me waving, waiting, worrying
, Richmond News Staff
07-30-2010
As a 53-year-old woman, I have been in my share of public restrooms during my lifetime. Like most women, wherever I go, I have to scope out where a restroom will be available in case I have to go.
With all these years of experience in using public toilets, I have also watched the interior of these rooms evolve into what the designers consider ‘state of the art.’ Wrong.
First, most public toilet stall doors open inward not outward. Who thought this one up? Someone who weighs 90 pounds? We’ve all seen how narrow public toilet stalls are, so when the door opens inward, you have to either straddle the dirty toilet while trying to close the door or stand to one side of it – if you can fit. Add to this a large purse, possibly shopping bags and a bulky coat and you are trying to get the door shut while trying not to drop something into the open toilet seat. It quickly becomes an award-winning ballet of coordination.
Once you are in, you hopefully find someplace to hang your “stuff.” Usually, however, the stall you pick has no hanger on the door because that particular one is the only one in the restroom that has been broken off. So, you have to place everything on the dirty floor and watch it so that no one reaches under the stall door and grabs your possessions.
Then of course, Murphy’s Law dictates that you’ve chosen a stall where the door doesn’t latch properly. So, while you are perched precariously on a dirty, public toilet, watching over your possessions, you are also carefully looking under the stall door to determine if someone is going to try to enter your temporary domain and catch you with your pants down. One can almost hear the music to “Jaws” as you see a pair of feet approach your stall – you hold your breath – waiting to see if a hand will reach out and jiggle the door handle and, then breathe a sigh of relief when the feet move past your stall.
Of course, when entering a public restroom stall, you also have to contend with the dirty toilet seat, which, even if it doesn’t look dirty, you know someone else has sat on it. This is a piece of knowledge that millions of men and women try desperately not to think about when they enter a public restroom. Because if we did think about it – we’d all go insane.
A lot of public restrooms have those nifty dispensers for toilet-seat covers fastened to the wall over the toilet. I’m always excited when I see one of those, until that is, I try to get one out of the dispenser without tearing it and placed onto the toilet seat, my pants pulled down and my butt parked on the seat all without either the automatic toilet flusher engaging or the seat cover drifting down into the toilet water before I’ve had my opportunity to sit.
What is really needed, is a container of Clorox wipes attached to the wall for wiping the seat down to a sanitary level.
Once you’ve accomplished your business, you then have to wash your hands. It always amazes me how many women sneak out of the restroom without washing their hands. Once again, if one considered how many people do this in a public restroom, the sheer potential of thinking about the germs could make someone go crazy.
Newer restrooms now contain what some idiot designer figured was an innovative, germ-free way of washing ones hands – faucets that you do not have to touch. You merely wave you hands below the faucet, triggering the water to turn on, allowing you to wash your hands without touching anything more than the soap dispenser (some restrooms even have automatic soap dispensers). The concept is great, if the silly water would just turn on. Half the time, I’ve spent a good two minutes waving my hands in a number of directions just to get the water to turn on and once it does, it shuts off after 30 seconds. That means I have to go through another round of waving just to rinse my hands. Maybe that’s why so many people don’t wash their hands.
Finally, hands washed, I turn to the dryer – praying it has real paper towels in it – the kind I can pull out myself. Nope – my stomach lurches as I spy yet another delightful invention designed to drive a woman mad – a dryer that requires me to wave my hands somewhere in front of it in order to get a towel out. Of course, once the towel does dispense, it is only large enough to dry the hands of an infant and I have to wave like a madwoman to get another towel out.
Then there is the job of getting out of the bathroom without touching the door, because you just know at least a dozen women and/or children have touched that door handle after going potty without washing their hands. This isn’t easy if the door and trash can where you want to throw your towel away aren’t near each other. This becomes another coordinated dance of grabbing the door handle with your paper towel, holding the door open with your foot and stretching your body back toward the trashcan trying to reach the receptacle so you can throw your paper towel away.
Like I said, whoever designed these restrooms has never had to use one on a regular basis – or is just plain insane.
Most of us have our own humorous tales of interesting bathroom experiences. Even with all my years of using public restrooms, I’ve never encountered one like my sister’s experience back in 1968 when we had gone to Nova Scotia, Canada for a vacation.
Mom, Dad and myself had left a few days earlier than my sister to make the drive from New Jersey to Nova Scotia. This meant my sister had to drive by herself. It was 1968, so the roads weren’t as crowded as they are today. She made it through New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts and was in southern Maine when she had to stop at a rest area.
Entering the public restroom, she chose a stall. Back in those days, most of the restrooms had these narrow, rectangular toilet paper dispensers that housed tiny little rectangles of rough paper. The paper dispensers had to be designed by someone who has never used a public restroom because if he/she had, the dispensers never would have made it into the public domain. You needed about 50 of those little towels to be useful and they often got “stuck” in the top of the dispenser making it impossible to retrieve – as my sister found on this trip.
She reached for the dispenser and frustratingly, she found the paper jammed up inside. Reaching a finger up inside the dispenser to try to loosen the paper, she got hold of the sheets and pulled. Much to her horror – her finger was stuck up inside the dispenser. She pulled and yanked in an effort to get her finger out – no luck. Swallowing her pride, she started to yell for help and was rewarded by seeing a little blond head under the door.
A little boy, about 3, said, “Hey lady, watchya want?”
“My finger is stuck in this box,” said my sister.
The little boy turned to his mom and said, “Hey mom, this stupid lady got her finger stuck inside the toilet paper box.”
More humiliation.
My sister had to wait patiently while the male rest area attendant had to come into her stall and free her from the evil toilet paper dispenser.
The moral of this tale? Always leave your house prepared – have a pocket full of Kleenex for restroom emergencies, be sure your underwear is clean, and don’t drink a lot of liquids to limit the number of times you’ll have to visit the “little girl’s room.”
You can reach Liz Johnson at production@richmond-dailynews.com.
