As I said, the one time it happened to me I had to go really really badly. No time to exit once I had mistakenly entered the ladies room.
Once that I recall. My Dad was having emergency quadruple bypass surgery and I was tired and worried. Inadvertently walked into the Women’s restroom, saw a row of stalls (a couple of which were in use), and quickly turned and walked back out. Got away with it…I think.
I walked into the wrong locker room at a new gym I had just joined.
I went in (nobody was in there) changed into my gym clothes and went and worked out. When I finished my workout, I went right back in and as I’m changing back into my street clothes I see a woman standing at the doorway of the locker room.
I’m thinking to myself: “what the hell is this lady’s problem?” And I kind of scowl at her. That’s when she told me I was in the women’s locker room.
I’ve never been so embarrassed in my life. Uhg!
What the heck is a squat pan? NM. I can imagine.
Where would this be?
Out here you better be road broke, as it were. Restrooms are scarce…the nearest gas station, pizza joint, liquor store, lottery outlet(not a dang newspaper in sight, tho’) has a sign on the door- says: “No indoor restrooms. You can go outback, if you really need to. Pick a tree. Privacy not implied. Don’t beg.”
The next indoor place to pee is at least 20 miles. According to your direction.
The outback, underbelly of Arkansas isn’t for the snowflakes.
Like this?
Arkansas. Where men are macho, women are too, and the ants are used to golden floods.
Inboard & outboard really threw me for a loop when I was a kid.
I don’t remember the washrooms specifically but that store is certainly difficult to get around in. And the parking lot … just awful.
I’ve started to go through the doorway a few times, but realized my error before seeing the room beyond.
Only once did I do the OP thing of actually walking in and wondering where the urinals were. The venue had very abstract, arty male and female signs.
Do all men’s restrooms have the urinals immediately visible when you walk in? I haven’t been in that many of them and don’t know.
I would think that, in order for confusion to be all that difficult once the door was open, that would have to be true and also everybody would have to know it was true, as opposed to thinking it was just a different design with the urinals tucked discreetly behind the sinks or stalls.
In my experience, many, but not all.
In a bar, certainly. In an airport, generally not.
Once when I was four or five, before I could read, I almost went into the ladies’ room at a highway rest stop. But my father was there and explained about the male and female icons. I haven’t come close to using the wrong-gendered bathroom since.
Once when I was about ten while shopping at Kmart, I opened the door to a men’s room that I didn’t notice was marked “employees only.” Before I could step inside, a disproportionately angry employee stopped me and chewed me out. I never willingly went back to that store again. I shed exactly zero tears when Kmart went bankrupt years later.
I have never seen an airport men’s room without a row of urinals.
Well, no, but can you see the row as soon as you walk in? That was the question.
I walked into the ladies changing room at the gym once. I’d forgotten my prescription goggles so I was as blind as a bat and picked what I thought was the correct door from the pool. The room was empty, but the pastel colour scheme told me I was in the wrong place. If there had been women changing in there I wouldn’t have seen anything anyway. I still apologised loudly to the empty room.
One company I worked for had 2 toilets per floor, one for each gender. My floor was populated entirely by men (IT Dept), so we ignored the signs and used both. We used to get monthly emails from management telling us not to in case there was a female visitor. We just called them unisex toilets.
Around about 1970 or so, four of us guys squeezed into a VW bug and drove nonstop from Boston to Miami.
Somewhere around South Carolina we stopped for gas and one of the guys had to poop.
The men’s room was locked so he went in the ladies’ room. And neglected to lock the door.
Did I mention this guy was black? Well some good old gal walked in on him. That’s when the merriment ensued.
Somehow, we got out of there in one piece.
Just thought of another case:
I moved cities, and therefore schools, in November of 10th grade. It was one of the first days at my new school. Since I joined two months into the school year I had missed all the orientation at the beginning of the year. So I was trying to find my way around this very large, new-to-me, high school. I went into one building, and someone immediately shouted at me: “You know this is the girls locker room, right!?”
All the time. If nobody is in the Women’s Faculty restroom and someone is in the Men’s, I’ll pee in the Ladies Loo. No prob. The only times I remember doing accidentally as an adult was at a college hang-out that had “clever” directions.
THE MEN’S ROOM
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is over there.
The most recent one I encountered? In France, if I recall correctly.
Point of this style toilet is, there is no seat, so you never touch anything with bare skin…
Disadvantages: people with disabilities.
I’m on your side in that one.
A friend and I, along with our wives, stopped at an unfamiliar shopping center to pick up some food and drinks to have where we were going. We walked across the car park, me chatting to him, our wives behind us in animated conversation. One of us spotted the men’s toilets and decided a visit was in order. So we walked in, through two doors and when we got to the urinal, looked around to see our wives had followed us. They had assumed that we were entering the shopping center proper.
Years ago, I was riding my motorcycle in southern Japan and got something in my eye. I had hard contacts then and it was painful. I stopped in a supermarket and found the restrooms, and went in an washed my contacts. After finishing that, I noticed that they had one small urinal, which I presume was for boys small enough that mothers could take them in with them.
Fortunately, no one used the restroom in those few minutes.