To the Women in my Building--TMI & Gross

Brand Spanking New. Just out of the Box. Pristine. Untouched. Perfect.

Hatbox might have been better. Not sure what a bandbox actually is.

Well, according to my internal thesaurus, anyway.

N. Sane may have meant the ladies are Groupies…

Hah! I laugh at your delicate constitution and fragile senses!!! You haven’t lived until you’ve had to use a “squat ‘n’ drop” at a truck-stop / roadside mosque on the highway between Dammam and Riyadh in Saudi Arabia.

I was 29 weeks pregnant at the time (going to Riyadh for a business trip), so couldn’t last the 4.5 hour trip from Bahrain to Riyadh without a stop midway to pee. Of the 3 so-called toilets, 2 had faeces smeared all over the rim (where you should put your feet), so I was left holding my abbaya and dress (a caftan of sorts) up out of the urine that was liberally sprinkled all over the floor. Unfortunately, that didn’t leave me with a hand spare to hold my nose against the stench of decomposing human waste. Bleccccchhhhhhh! The worst thing was knowing I would have to go through it all again the next day on the way back!

Why are the Google ads in this thread for Tug-Ahoy? (You do remember our good friend JDT, don’t you?)

Ads: Poop Freeze, The Ultimate Toilet Seat, and Farm & Barn Toilet!

Alas, I don’t know who the disgusting pigs are, so I cannot type this up anonymously and leave it on their desks. Several months back I did a very helpful and informative flow chart on proper bathroom procedure, and one of my friends made copies and taped them on the doors of each stall, but they were ripped off and thrown onto the floor within an hour.

Baker reminded me in a MPSIMS thread (about my foot) that he’d posted a link to that old thread of mine. So, I promised to post in this thread a joke my parents sent me recently.

I feel lucky that the covenience stores in Japan are remarkably clean. The only problem I have with squat toilets is that if your stomach is already in a bit of distress, compressing it by squatting doesn’t help much.

My worst bathroom story is when I spilled soup on myself at the beginning of the NYC-Boston Chinatown bus trip. I had to change from my soaked jeans to my uncomfortable suit pants, which were the only others I had. I walked to the back and opened the door on a very surprised Chinese lady, who I guess didn’t know what a lock was. After she left, I walk in to discover that there’s pee on every horizontal surface. I don’t think it all came from this one lady, but she was rather surprised, after all. I had to take off my wet pants while balancing my others on some part of my body (my head? I can’t remember), trying not to touch any pee-soaked surface at the time. At one point my leg was propped against the rear wall above the toilet. Oh, did I mention that the bus was moving?

I managed to do it without getting my pants wet with other people’s pee. Mostly.

My unscientific poll with custodians and maintenance folks over the years (don’t ask) among public buildings, private buildings, campgrounds, hotels, motels, and any place else that has toilet facilities open to the public is that the women’s restrooms are not only universally far dirtier than men’s restrooms, but the messes in women’s restrooms are not confined to a selected locations, nor methods, nor degree of filth.