Seriously. I worked in retail for the first 17 years of my working life. Now I’m more of a professional office setting.
The bathroom habits, hands down, are far worse in the professional setting. I don’t know if it’s age of what (retail co-workers were 18-mid 30s, office co-workers are 30s-50s) but the dudes are disgusting. I don’t know how many times I’ve held my tongue when sitting in a stall next to some loud grunter not to say “WTF! Are you giving birth over there!?!”
I’m only speculating…going out on a limb here…in other parts of the world they don’t always have our commode style toilets. If you grew up using a squat-hole toilet, occasionally you might find that the more comfortable option for you. How do you replicate the squat-hole? …by standing (squatting) on the toilet seat. It does kinda change the whole vector of your business.
Do you have a lot of employees from other countries who might not have similar plumbing systems and are thus unaware of what’s flushable, or who might be used to toilets where you crouch over a hole? (I used a public flush toilet in Italy that looked exactly like an American-style public bathroom, down to the hand dryers, except that instead of the usual toilet there was a hole in the tile with a grooved foot rest on either side. Seriously.)
(Edit: Too slow at typing!)
I gather that some American women who think that public bathrooms are germy refuse to sit their asses down and will hover or even crouch atop the toilet seat. This surely does not help the germ situation.
We had this problem at an IBM site I was working at. The VP in charge of the place had to fire some people, and that just got the number of incidents down to the point where it wasn’t worth reporting any more.
Once I was using a urinal at work. A guy next to me finishes, grabs a toilet seat liner off the wall, uses it to wipe his hands, and then bunches it up and throws it in the urinal. This was in a federal government office building–not a public area.
So yeah, people are pigs. Well, at least enough of them to mess up the bathroom for the rest of us.
Oh, I have to go with EmilyG. Women’s restrooms are disgusting! Do they live like that at home? I’m baffled by the behavior of otherwise nice, seemingly fastidious women.
My first job in high school was doing maintenance/janitorial work at a hockey arena. The men’s rooms would occasionally have some paper towels on the ground. The women’s rooms were a war zone. :eek:
As someone who used to clean public bathrooms, I can attest that women are far worse. But men can be pretty bad.
There’s someone at work here who constantly lines the toilet seat with paper towels. And then leaves them there. I presume that this is because they are too disgusting for him to remove. Why should he touch something that his ass has been on? His ASS?
And someone has been throwing some disgusting black liquid in the sink and not rinsing it out. It’s a problem because it’s usually splashed on the outside of the sink as well. I’m always afraid my tie is going to touch it.
Another workplace bathroom practice I never understood was people who did their dishes in the sinks by rinsing their leftovers down the drain. When I was a little kid, my mom taught me to use a napkin or paper towel to wipe the solids into the trash, *then *put the dishes in the sink. Apparently that’s becoming a lost skill.
Nothing like turning on the water to wash your hands and seeing froot loops floating out of the drain…
And dropping paper towels 3" from the garbage receptacle? Really? Your mom must be so proud… :rolleyes:
The leftovers-down-the-sink crowd probably grew up with an in-sink garbage disposal, and then assumed that they come equipped in every sink in the universe. It’s surprising how little people THINK about their surroundings.
And I consider it my sworn duty to make fun of germophobes who are afraid of touching toilet seats, door handles, trash cans, and other “dirty” places.
