LINN: Some Thoughts On Public Restrooms

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Public restrooms are a major convenience for everyone, especially those who are out in public and desperately need to use them. But sometimes unfortunate circumstances take place. Here are a few examples:

• Some establishments (restaurants in particular) require people to make a purchase or pay a fee in order to use the restroom. Obviously, they do this in order to prevent the bums and other degenerates from going into the restrooms and doing God-knows-what.
• Some places lock the doors to their restrooms for these same reasons. Thus, anyone needing to use them has to get an employee to unlock the door.
• Whereas the women’s restroom will have more than one toilet stall (which is obvious), the men’s room will have just one toilet stall and one or more urinals.
• Sometimes the toilet stalls in the restrooms will also have a baby changing station in them, as opposed to being separate from the toilet stall.
• Some men’s restrooms do not have toilet stalls, in which the toilet will be next to the urinal, and the only way for a guy to have any privacy is to lock the door to the restroom.
• Sometimes the door to the toilet stall in the men’s restroom is locked. Either the door slams shut after someone exits the toilet stall and instantly locks itself, or some prankster decides to lock it, in which case someone else has to crawl underneath the door in order to unlock it.
• Some public restrooms are unisex, and thus possibly being for transgendered individuals (and everyone else). The same scenario sometimes applies to both the men’s room and the women’s room. In the case of the latter, there have been instances of women and girls being sexually assaulted by men who identify as women.
• And of course, some restrooms are in need of being cleaned, not having toilet paper or soap, or are out of order.

Apparently, the people who design the restrooms for these establishments (particularly the men’s restrooms) do not take into account that men have a tendency to defecate more than women do (I could be wrong on that). And for any guy who has to take a dump and encounters any of the previously mentioned scenarios, this can be a major inconvenience if he has to go really bad. The same scenario applies if he is feeling nauseous.
So perhaps these establishments should change their policies regarding their restrooms.

The following story is somewhat unrelated to the topic, but it is a true story:

A long time ago, one of my brothers was at home when he heard a banging at the door. When he answered it, my dad came running through the door yelling “get out of the way- I gotta “s**t!”. My brother dove for the couch in order to so, while my dad made a beeline for the bathroom (undoing his pants in the process). He managed to get to the toilet in time, and several minutes later he emerged from the bathroom and said “that was a close one”. Apparently he was unable or unwilling to use a public restroom at the time (I believe he had been making deliveries for the flower shop my parents owned when nature came calling).