The Urinal and You (A Guide to Peeing)

            I should be embarrassed to write this, as a fellow bro and all, but dammit somebody has to break the vow of silence and address some major problems going on in men's bathrooms everywhere. I’m sure you ladies have a whole batch of your own dark secrets so don’t get too smug. Fortunately for you, the humble reader of this fine blog, I’m not afraid to go where I have to go (see what I did there) to set things right. So let’s throw back the veil of secrecy on that pinnacle of male engineering, the urinal.

            It should be a pretty basic operation. You feel the urge to pee, keeping in mind that your going problem might be a growing problem (prostate health is no joke for you older bros), so you saunter to the bathroom. It’s important to note that in an office environment, peeing out of boredom is an acceptable excuse to escape the gravitational pull of your desk. Once you arrive for prayers at the altar of the golden god, things should be pretty straight forward, but here’s where you might feel compelled to break with normalcy and succumb to some baser instincts.

            Offender number one, in our lineup of puzzling urinal behavior is spitting. Guys, what the fuck is going on? It’s gotten to the point where even Pavlov would be scratching his head in awe. If the potpourri of fragrances in the bathroom is causing your mouth to water so much that you need to spit, you’ve got some issues. Granted, sometimes I look at the urinal mint and wonder if it really does tastes like a giant mentos, but it’s never gotten me that wet in the mouth. The insult to injury on this one is you jack-offs can’t even muster the mouth-eye coordination to land your loogies on target. The top shelf of the urinal looks like a pigeon lives on it. Personally, the last place I want to be with my mouth agape is standing over a fucking porcelain piss backstop. The laws of liquid dynamics clearly state that, “urine; once forcefully propelled from your pee-hole onto a solid object, will project in an unpredictable fashion, until such time as gravity will draw all of the errant droplets into a downward trajectory, covering your shoes and the floor at your feet in  a strangely sticky pee-based solution”. In layman’s terms, you might just catch a little sprinkle of tinkle in your pie hole if your mouth is open while you pee. Comprende? Can we agree to stop spitting in the urinal? Jesus, do we really even need to spit at all?

            The second felon, in our lineup of bathroom bandits, is snots. Not Cousin Eddies loveable Rottweiler, I’m talking about the crusty green guys that live in your nose. I’m already taking some liberties calling them green, because from what I’ve seen in the office bathroom lately, they’re ranging from brown to yellow, with stops at red and green along the way. You might want to add a trip to the Otolaryngologists (look it up idiot) while you're scheduling a prostate exam. The walls near the urinal look like some kind of paint sample from the Home Depot in hell, with dried snots in a dizzying array of colors. I don’t think I need to expound on what’s wrong with that picture. Let’s see if we can kill two birds with one proverbial stone and keep our fingers out of our noses and off the walls of the bathroom. As a caveat to that, if you need to lean on the wall to brace yourself against one of those, giant-coffee-before-a-two-hour-meeting types of pisses, you can allow your hand to touch the wall in lieu of passing out from the sheer ecstasy of releasing such a torrent of pleasure.

            This last one is a twofer. I’m going to roll proper urinal spacing together with intra-urinal chit chat. Conversation in the bathroom is often the accomplice to the crime of improper urinal selection. I always thought using the bathroom was a pretty private enterprise. It’s not that I have a shy bladder per se; it’s just that I prefer to go it alone. So when someone decides to belly-up next to me in an otherwise empty bathroom, I start to get nervous. Proper spacing seems like it should be pretty well understood. When possible, it’s your responsibility to allow a buffer of at least one urinal. The same basic spacing rules apply to guys in the movie theater, on the train, sitting at the dinner table, etc. Unless you have no choice but to pee next to me, I’m going to go ahead and assume you’re either a peter hawk, or a bathroom conversationalist. “Finally feeling like spring outside eh?” “Mondays are so brutal right?” “Dude, I got so drunk last night.” If you’re the one saying that shit to me while I’m taking a leak, shut the fuck up right now or I swear to God I’m gonna piss on your leg. Unfortunately for me, there seems to be a correlation between workplace seniority and bathroom chatter. The higher your face is carved on my totem pole of corporate command, the more inclined you’ll be to attempt small talk with your manhood in your hand (poetic I know). I’m assuming it’s empowering looking down on me from the heights of Mount Porcelainius, whilst you pee, spit and make small talk effortlessly, like the immortal you are.

            In summation, let’s think of the bathroom like its Fukushima Daiichi reactor number 1. Let’s get in and out of that mothefucker as soon as our work is done. Hey, if you need to chat, I’m happy to wait for you out in the hall near the spittoon cowboy.