One of my responsibilities in my part time job is to ensure that the bathrooms are reasonably clean and stocked, this equates roughly to once a shift boogieing around the building with a cart full of TP and paper towel (or many times during the most dreaded of all times on campus, dance festival season, but that is a different post). I’m not sure if behaviour in bathrooms are a psychological goldmine for understanding the human psyche, but a couple of interesting behaviours come to mind when it comes to maintaining the Water-closets where I work.
1. The amazing stupidity of people who think that wetting a bit of paper towel or TP and putting it on the roll of TP; thus ruining an entire roll of toilet paper. For what? What brave crusade are you fighting here dudes (and it is always dudes, not once in my 10 years working have I seen women be this stupid)? Your brave ‘fuck the system’ stance starts with destroying 45 cents worth of TP? Your cherished radical narchism has no room for bumfluff? The fuq? I just don’t get it.
2. For point two we have pictorial evidence. Observe.
Aww, you don’t want to catch anything from the nasty toilet seat, amiright? Your fine sense of hygiene is protecting your valued tuckus by laying down that half-micron thick patina of toilet paper protection. You are good now, “golden” even. You can do your business confidently and securely. Your commitment to cleanliness and hygiene should be applauded.
So, hyper hygiene freaks, why do you leave the TP on the seat? What is your reasoning behind this? Is pushing the TP the two centimeters into the bowl some sort Everest K2 type of task? Is Atlas pounding on the door demanding that you save some of that world-lifting action for him? If you’re all squicky about touching the TP your ass was just on could you not use your foot and nudge the now “toxic” paper straight into the loo (it is what I do after shaking my head for having to deal with your idiocy)?
Here is my hypothesis – and this applies to both dudes and dudettes – you are worried about your hygiene, but in your cravenly small self centered universe you really don’t care about the next person who has to deal with now adorned porcelain you’ve left behind. You exhibit a glaringly pathetic of empathy and consideration for the next person by not taking the two seconds to move your butt-shield into the loo. Concomitantly you are also slavishly embracing the foolhardy notion of the world revolving around your special-snowflake axis of posterior protection; and that positively pisses me off.
And thus, you too my toilet dressing friend are lumped into the same opprobrium deserving category as the brave anarchists sticking it to the Man by wetting toilet paper rolls.
Do you do this? If you do, please consider reforming your behaviour as I am sure it is furrowing brows everywhere for those who have to look after restrooms and puzzle why people do such inane things on such a regular basis.
Gaah!
bleatmop
Mystro
Dead Wild Roses 
9 comments
October 30, 2013 at 6:46 am
pale
Its the ones who have OBVIOUSLY perched above the seat leaving the seat in a spray of……ugh,
Those ones……they are the worst of the lot.
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October 30, 2013 at 7:16 am
bodycrimes
How come the toilet paper is so neatly laid out? Shouldn’t it have scrunched under the person who used it? So is the photo evidence that (a) someone laid down toilet paper and then discovered they were constipated and didn’t sit down (b) someone sat down, used the toilet and then thoughtfully rearranged their toilet paper? (c) someone laid out their toilet paper, did their business and then thoughtfully laid down toilet paper for the next person?
It’s a mystery.
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October 30, 2013 at 11:39 am
nostalgic
I saw this a long time ago, up it’s still a valid request”
We aim to please. You aim too, please
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October 31, 2013 at 9:41 am
ubi dubium
What makes me laugh about this is that they are probably not really accomplishing much of anything with their butt shield. If a public lavatory is reasonably well maintained, then I don’t thinks the seat is likely to be the germiest place in the bathroom. Our hands are much germier than most of the rest of our bodies, and so the flush handle, the stall handle, sink knobs and the door handle are likely to be much worse than the seat, and probably cleaned less often. Unless the butt shield perpetrator was also wearing rubber gloves they probably didn’t protect themselves from much!
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November 1, 2013 at 8:41 am
The Arbourist
@Nostalgic
Love it. :> Signage should be made!
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November 1, 2013 at 8:42 am
The Arbourist
@Ubi D
*grins*
I guess it’s weird human psychology at work. Bums are dirty!! Must protect my clean tuckas! Fails to realize germs don’t care and are on everything else touched. :)
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November 1, 2013 at 11:26 pm
bleatmop
The funny part is that the bum is the probably one of the cleanest areas of the human body. If everyone would simply use a toilet as intended and had basic hygiene rare would be the case that we would have a toilet seat that we had to worry about (influenza season aside).
Seriously though, I would rather eat off a public toilet seat rather than just about any other public surface. I did the cultures in university to prove it. I got a total of 4 cultures from my swab of the toilet seat, and none in any of the diluted areas. The sink tap and the door handle though were literally overgrown though. They had to take the door handle one out early because it was growing so fast. There was barely any nutrient agar left on that dish.
The cool part about doing that experiment is that it served a public good. One of my class mates swabbed a public chair, and the agar that was designed to help grow fungus showed a weird fungus that the 3 PHD’s and 5 Master degrees teaching that class could not identify. They went so far as to get a Hazmat team take that chair out of the building and did a terminal cleaning of the entire ward. That student was also a celebrity with the faculty for a bit for making that find.
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November 2, 2013 at 8:19 am
The Arbourist
@Bleatmop
Fascinating! Do you still have the study? Consider publishing it here in the name of Science? :)
Hoomans are weird that way as they let societal taboos inform their behaviour despite what science has to say. Your study, as described, is an excellent ‘teachable moment’. Thanks Bleat. :)
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November 4, 2013 at 12:19 pm
bleatmop
Lol, well, it wasn’t so much a study as a laboratory experiment. It was in my microbiology lab and each student was given 4 agar plates, 2 nutrient agar, and 2 that I-can’t-remember-the-name-but-it-was-good-for-growing-fungus-on. I chose the mundane route to confirm the “common knowledge” out there that I was told, but had not saw direct evidence for, that being the toilet seat vs taps, while my friend also did the door handle. As such, the only reports done on it were those done by each student that were handed in for a grade. Unfortunately I don’t have the report any more.
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