An Observation About Bathrooms

I had to drop the car off at the dealership for some repairs. Of course, nothing is ever easy as it should be so when I got there my ride was nowhere in sight and I had to sit around for an hour and half until they showed up.

With nothing else to do I was wandering the premises. At one point I checked out their restroom and I was shocked by how beautiful it was! Marble floor, sparkling sink, fancy-shaped soaps! This place looked like it would be better suited for a ritzy hotel.

Like you would turn around and a bathroom attendant would hand you a towel. It didn’t even look to be the same environment as where I handed my keys to a guy coated in grease. I imagine all this was meant to impress potential customers ready to drop some cash on a new car and the grease monkeys weren’t allowed to use it. They probably have to use a coke can or something.

Over the bathroom toilet there was a sign that said “Gentleman Please Use Urinal”. I thought this was very interesting. First the word “gentleman”. Maybe it’s just places I’ve been going to lately, but I don’t see the word “gentleman” associated with bathrooms as much as I used to. Maybe because it’s too long of a word to fit on most signs. Places try to get all cutesy on their door and use stuff like “Guys”, “Dudes”, “Gents”. At least those are more unique than the just boring and direct – “Men”.

I like seeing if the place has the braile version on the bathroom sign designating if it’s a ‘men’s’ or ‘women’s’ bathroom. I always thought that if a blind guy was having an emergency, went searching for a bathroom, finally managed to find a door and it happened to be the women’s room, that it would be ok for him to use it. He made it that far, let’s just cut the guy some slack on it.

And what would be the big deal if he did accidentally wander into the woman’s room? It’s not like they could say he was some kind of pervert trying to sneak a peek at the ladies.

So this sign was instructing guys to use the urinal. My guess was they were trying to keep this place as clean as possible and didn’t want to run the risk of trusting some shady ‘gentlemen’ of just doing their business all over the seat and then having a ‘lady’ walk in and be forced to deal with that mess. That probably wouldn’t look too favorably on them. I’m not sure I would buy a car from a place that couldn’t manage to keep their toilet clean.

Then I had a thought – I could make them regret this sign. It specifically said to use the urinal, but it didn’t specify under what circumstances. It just said use it! One could assume that goes for everything. There was no list, no instructions, no notation stating “ok, well in this case go ahead and use the toilet”. One could argue they assumed the ‘urinal sign’ was blanket rule stating the toilet was off limits under every circumstance.

If I was really low class I could make them rethink that sign. A guy would walk out of that bathroom and go right over to the boss to complain – “that urinal is disgusting!” as he would begin to describe what they were shocked to see in it. And they could never say the Gentleman Culprit” didn’t adhere to the rules of the sign. If a ‘Lady’ left the present there, then that would be a different story. The sign never specified ‘Ladies’ to use the urinal, so they would automatically be guilty of not following the rules.

These are the kind of thoughts I get when I’m sitting around for an hour and half with nothing to do.