On Yap Island in Micronesia, the public restrooms are outhouses (called Benjos) located on stilts out over the lagoon. The lagoon is called Benjo Bay and can smell to high heavens (especially during low tide) since every bar in the city (if Colonia, Yap can be called a city) has at least one benjo out over the lagoon. To get to the outhouse you have to walk out to the benjo on zig-zaged slat paths suspended over the “bay”. During a late night of drinking some questionable concoctions, a number of people don’t make it (yes, it is revolting). The worst part is yet to come, though.
In the bay are fish called Archer Fish which get insects by shooting out this high intensity spit of water at flys, mosquitoes and other flying insects flitting above the water. For some reason these fish have taken to using their skills at the bare bottoms of humans peaking through the hole in the seat part of the benjo and using the facilities. So as you sit do do your business you get these sharp quick stabbing (and relatively cold) feelings that leave your bottom soggy. Even if you know what’s going on, it’s still no fun and always very, very surprising.
It is fun, however, to sit at the point where the slat sidewalk makes landfall and watch the door as a newcomer goes out to the benjo over the bay for the first time. Watching she or he come shooting out of the outhouse at full speed with pants and underwear down around the knees, trying to navigate the suspended one-foot wide, zig-zagy gangway back to the shore is better than any Comedy Channel program I’ve ever seen.
Hey, what can I say, small island, not much to do…After all, not every place gets a dead junkie.
Ozzfest. Alpine Valley, WI. 1998.
I could have sworn I was the only female in the entire crowd. Evidently I was wrong. And evidently, the fifty thousand invisible women at this concert were ALL on Day 1 or Day 2 of ye olde period.
When I went in the bathroom, I was immediately greeted with a giant plastic garbage can that was piled high with used tampons and pads. The can had overflowed and the floor was covered in wet cotton and menstrual smears.
No, wait - so was every single toilet. Apparently if you have enough crappy concert beer you think a toilet serves a double purpose as a garbage can. A mess of shit, piss, cotton and menstrual blood so high you couldn’t even stand over the toilet.
For the first time in my life, I wished I was a vampire, so all the blood wouldn’t have bothered me so much. You could have filled a blood bank with that bathroom.
Oh yeah, and it was a 100-degree day. And the bathroom building had a metal roof and no windows.
Mad props to Ozzy, who actually did show me a pretty good vision of hell that day.
When on a tour of Ireland in 1999, we had stopped at Trinity College to use the facilities. Just a few steps down the hall from the Book of Kells, I found the unholy triumvirate of blood, urine, and feces all on the same solitary toilet seat. I was forced to leave the stall with my hands up so there would be no one thinking that I was the one responsible for this atrocity.
Probably not as bad as a dead junkie, but at least you could move him aside and take a dump if you wanted to…
Also: I know this is off the topic, and I know I will be railed on by the women in this thread, and I know that women’s rooms have long lines and when you gotta go, you gotta go, but I’ve always found it upsetting when women come into the men’s room without asking. I think it’s because one time this happened when I was at the movies, and the women was quite loud and rude about it, like she was a crusader for women’s rights or something.
OK, back to the topic now. Sorry.
This story comes from my memory of a newpaper article and it happened about a dozen years ago.
At a campground right next to the ocean in San Luis Obispo they only had pit toilets. Well this guy got into the pit of one of the womens outhouses watching women do their business from the bottom.
Ooh, I’ve wanted to share this story for a while
My friend was an intern at the office of Lane Evans (D-IL) and we had lunch at the Longworth Cafeteria together. We talked, had fun, etc. However, I was stupid and ate some refried Grade F meat from the Chinese joint there so I needed to stop at the mens room. So I walked back to Evans’s office with my friend and went to the nearest bathroom. I walk into the farthest stall and what do I see on the toilet seat?
Semen.
Someone pleasuring himself [probably] had missed.
Here’s the interesting part. Lane Evans’s office is more or less adjacent to Gary Condit’s and that bathroom was the closest to Evans’s office that I know of, so I figure I very well could have seen Gary Condit’s cum. Yeah, there are probably around a hundred male staffers who might’ve used that bathroom to relieve themself midday but you never know.
Another Ireland story, again with the caveat that it lacks a dead junkie:
In America, we have an unspoken “code of the men’s room.” (Just in case you ladies don’t know of it.) The rules are simple: walk in, choose a stall that has at least one empty stall between you and the next guy, stare straight ahead (whistling optional), don’t speak, do your business, zip up, wash up, walk out. I found that in Ireland, this was literally a foreign concept. At one bar (I think this was the King’s Head in Galway), they didn’t have stalls, just one long trough. And, despite the fact that the trough covered the whole wall, the only other person using it at the time saw fit to stand RIGHT NEXT TO ME and chatter the whole time.
A nice fellow otherwise, but I got REALLY uncomfortable the few times he chose to take a glance “down there.” (Key rule of the men’s room: you NEVER look “down there.”) And since we were both in a bar, we were both full enough that this went on for several minutes…as I recall, I was in a corner and couldn’t really slide away. Boy, did that experience feel like it was endless.
I tell ya… there’s nothing quite like the sound of a bunch of guys with sloppy runs flowing in unison due to “nerves” about 15 minutes before the California Bar Exam.
Technically, this is not a “public” restroom so it may not qualify, but it is mildly similar to Eve’s story.
This was in a dorm bathroom; you know, one of those that services the entire floor. Some guys from our floor in the dorm had been up in the mountains and hit and killed a moose. I can tell already that you are way ahead of me. They loaded the moose into the back of their pickup and came back to school and, still drunk, they figured it would be a good joke to sit the moose on a comode of the communal john. As I remember, it took some bunjee cords but that was accomplished. they also removed the door from the stall. That way as you looked into the mirror while shaving, brushing your teeth or whatever you were looking at the dead moose. It was a hell of a way to wake up.
Now this was generally agreed to be a great joke and people came from all over to see “Bert” as he was named for some reason. The problem was that this was not a “stuffed” moose. He was a dead moose and as dead things tend to do with time, he began to have problems. The building’s custodians refused to have anything to do with the beastie and bugs he was attracting and before long, as the smell got worse, anything to do with the bathroom. In fact the people on that floor of the dorm began going to other floors to bath, shave, etc. It became quite revolting.
Eventually, the school administration found out who had done it and threatened them with expulsion if they did not get the thing out of bathroom. I undersand it was a gross trip but they took the former bathroom resident and dumped him on some open land about 20 miles from the school.