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Choosing a bathroom stall to use in a public restroom is no easy task. This is true if you are a man or a woman and care about toilet cleanliness. It is not as if I expect that a public bathroom is going to maintain the same standard of cleaning that I perform in my own home, but I at least want to think that in some small way, cleaning happens rather than have it be ULTRA OBVIOUS, that it does not.
I would make this assumption if all the stalls from which I must choose, are, simply put, gross. However, more often than not, there are isolated stalls which are gross and some which are not, indicating that either cleaning happens with some regularity and select individuals are just gross, or cleaning happens infrequently, and most individuals tidy up after themselves. I’d like to think that it is a combination of both.
For example, consider an airport bathroom in the United States. Although I have not visited all of the airport bathroom across all of the airports in all of the USA, the public bathrooms in Boston will suffice as a generalized example. Given that I may consider my theory correct in that the bathroom is cleaned on a regular basis and there are a certain number of bathroom users who are tidy and a certain number who are not, when facing a long row of stalls, I often consider, how many doors do I have to try before finding the stall which was either just cleaned or just used by a tidy person?
Do I try the first stall and work my way down or do I start with the last stall and work my way up? I am a tidy bathroom goer so then I think, which one would I naturally be inclined to use; one in the middle? Unfortunately, I have not yet found the magic formula of bathroom stall selection which results in the fewest door tries. Perhaps, this is because when I find that one end of the row of stalls is consistently cleaner than the other end, there seem to be shortages of toilet paper in these stalls, rendering use of them, tricky for another set of reasons…
Since I cannot control the cleaning frequency of public bathrooms, I would rather use this space as a forum to make a plea to untidy bathroom goers so that they may become tidier. Please, I would implore you to remember that this is a public bathroom. If you want to have a dirty bathroom, do it at home. Aim for the toilet and don’t throw your trash in it. When you are finished, maybe consider wiping up after yourself, or at a minimum, press the flush button. Or wave your hand in front of it. Or simply pull the lever! Whatever and however it is, try to leave no trace of evidence that you were there because I don’t like having to try 6 or 8 stall doors before I find one that I can use!
Ugh! Ugh!
Kathy Naumann, possessor of NATURALLY curly hair and the understanding that you can’t control everything!
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