Observations of the Observant

At work the electric truck design team in housed in the East Office Building. This grand ediffice is a prefab building. Everyone calls it the "trailer." I call it the "back forty." It isn't bad. It has a lunch room, a couple conference rooms and a sea of cubicles. The men's bath room has 4 urinals and 4 stalls. The 1st urinal is a kid height and the next three are higher. Not progressively higher just one heighth but higher than the first. They each have a little metal privacy partition mounted to the wall. So they offer decent privacy to the male taking care of business. These are manual flushers. In general the users of the bathroom use urinals 2 and 4.

A couple months back I observed this trend and decided that number 3 was being neglected and would never be worn out at the same rate as 2 and 4. So I started using number 3. Oh boy! That throws off the every-other-one double the privacy trend. So now to my amusement some co-users, after a moments hesitation will go to the low rider number 1. I have even noticed a couple people going to a stall. Now and then the really bold and secure person will go right to number 2 or 4...

Now this phenomenon is interesting because in lots of the country's airport rest rooms there are no dividers. In some really old places it is the stainless steel trough. So what do these people do in those cases? Is this the male ego in action?

Maybe it is the whole homophobia thing. When taking post Boy Scout young men camping 20 miles from civilization, they would actually change clothes in their sleeping bags! (We didn't have tents.) On this same trip we had a cool guy that wore his jeans way low. So out in the middle of a field with no one but the other guys, I pants him. There he stood in his boxers that eveyone saw half of all the time, becoming embarassed that we could see all of his boxers. What a crack up!

When I was a school age kid, there was no such thing as privacy in a locker room. My sons tell me that some boys wait in line for a stall to change in. Hummmm. This is interesting. I'm not sure where this is going. It is just an observation.

I think it is funny to use the 3rd urinal and quietly watch the norm get upset. DMP