Bathroom Etiquette

So I was in the washroom, and 2 stalls over from me, a dude was having a phone conversation! A full-on energetic phone conversation with whoever the poor soul was on the other end! Talk about your multitasking! But seriously guys, there’s a time and a place for everything, and rarely do these things coincide with the times where you choose to take a dump. If your sentences are being punctuated by grunts and groans, there’s something seriously wrong with the picture.

The john. The potty. The commode. The porcelain throne. The little boys’/girls’ room. The ladies’ room. The can. The W.C. The latrine.

Call it what you want to call it, but a toilet’s a toilet. However, despite the number of names we have for our porcelain friend and the things we do to it, I’d argue that there’s one standard code of conduct that we should all follow to:

• Not piss our peers off (pun intended)
• Carry ourselves with an air of decorum
• And just be HYGENIC. Let’s not be a species of disgusting havens for disease, guys!

Now, upon doing research for this post, I quickly found that this is a very unpopular topic of conversation. I asked different people—coworkers, friends, the Internet—and didn’t get too much of a response other than “WTFs” and “Are you kidding mes?!” Yeah, so never doing that again. But what I can tell you is what I know:

• If you live with someone, clean up after yourself—no, seriously. Hair and toothpaste in the sink? Soap suds left in the bathtub? Clothes left lying around? Take care of that!
• Learn the art of the double-flush: You should always flush to make sure that everything went down, because too often people assume that toilets are flawless and take care of all the work for you. PLEASE CHECK BEHIND YOU BEFORE LEAVING. ‘Cause seriously. Y’all nasty.
• And of course, the women’s washroom is a mysterious and magical place that no man will ever understand.
• However, what one female friend DID tell me is that if you’re a woman and you’re waiting for a stall, wait OUTSIDE. I mean—someone standing there? Listening to you do your business? That’s just creepy.
• And guys don’t really do this (yeah, we’ll get to this shortly), but keep the inter-stall chit-chat to a minimum. It’s just not the time or the place. Is this why you ladies go to washrooms in groups? I swear—that’s beyond confusing.

Another friend mentioned her trio of simple rules:

• Wash your hands
• Don’t leave a mess
• Don’t take phone calls in the washroom!

So simple, yet not followed often enough!

So the lessons that we learn here? For one, don’t be a David Blaine:

“I always use the first urinal in the restroom. And sometimes I don’t know which is the first urinal, so I’ll start on the right one, then move to the left one. Then **** it, I have to hit all of them.” — David Blaine, Esquire, August 2010

Or how about Penny Arcade, who happened to make a couple of comics about this just the other day?

So yes, let’s clean up our act… and the bathroom, while we’re at it.

73/365