Friday, August 29, 2008

Poop Smeared in Hard to Reach Places

I poop at work quite often. This has been established before, but i need re-emphasize the fact that most of my observations on the state of pooping in America come from the work place restroom. There are other places I poop and they vary widely, especially as I have grown older and my fear of pooping in public restrooms has dwindled quite significantly. But I have taken extensive notes on my co-workers' poops.
One coworker specifically has captivated me with his complete disregard for cleanliness and poop etiquette. Now, i can write a billion blogs on what I have observed him accomplish fecally, but what I observed today raises general questions on the restroom as a communal space and what taking responsibility for your poo entails.
Today, I rushed into the bathroom stall to see a familiar site. Brown streaks smeared in the upper-most reaches of the toilet bowl. I'm talking just under the seat. A place where no water travels and once it gets dirty, it stays dirty until a little elbow grease can take care of it.
First off, the smear was so high up there are only three ways it could have gotten there:
1.) He practices yoga when he poops (Sun Salutation) and his asshole points skywards, offering his waste to the gods.
2.) He shits so strongly that it richochets off the water and bounces right back to wear it came from. I can't imagine what the wipe is like.
3.) He has a weak sphincter resulting in weak precision and wide poo trajectory.

Now, this a very fundamental part of poop etiquette that I have discussed before. You need to stick around after the wipe and flush to see what sort of damage you have done. Then you need to complete damage control. It's kind of Similar to the nature-aware mentality that states, "leave the camp-site cleaner then how you found it."
Seeing these hard to reach streaks of poo do not anger me as much as the terrible things I observe on a daily basis (i.e. the fools that have to pee in the stall toilet, but don't lift the seat or wipe the seat, leaving the beads of urine on the seat for the more stall-entitled poopers to either sit on or clean up). I think these streaks are represent a larger problem of the poorly designed American public restroom. Why are we not offered the tools to get at these hard to reach streaks? Why are we not offered a toilet that is totally self cleaning? If there was anything in the world that should be self cleaning, it should be a public toilet. I swear, considering the lack of poo etiquette in this country, we are only a few steps away from having all public restroom rights taken away. It's too much work to keep clean and current restrooms are not designed to handle all the messy people out in the world.
I was in Germany a few years back (7 years ago). Got dinner at a gas station (USA! USA!) and used their bathroom. The fucking toilet seat was self-cleaning. My god, we are so far behind. It's this type of sweeping innovation that needs to occur in our restroom facilities.

ENOUGH!

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