On the bus the other day, I watched with fascination as a mother amused her son by putting on his hat, and letting it fall off her head. The kid loved it. But why? When you think about it, recognizing that this situation is funny requires a lot of knowledge and complex recognition. The child needs to understand how a hat is supposed to work, that the hat is too small for his mother’s head, that the hat is falling off because it’s too small, and finally recgonize that the combination of these factors is humorous. Ain’t wetware great?
On a similar, slightly tangential, note I’ve really started to notice urinal etiquette. That’s right, urinal etiquette. Unbeknownst to women, men engage in a delicate and complex dance around those ceramic portals, the rules of which are learned at a very early age. In their simpliest form, the rules are:
- Always leave a urinal between you and another man.
- Don’t talk.
- Don’t look.
That’s it. Simple, right? But what happens if there’s three urinals, and two are already occupied (the two end ones, obviously, otherwise they’d be violating rule 1)? What if there are only two urinals and one is already occupied? What is the right thing to do in those circumstances?
Well, not to worry, someone has already created the definitive resource to answer these and many other difficult questions: the International Center for Bathroom Etiquette.
I kid you not.
They host a comprehensive manual on urinal etiquette, ranging from simple logistics to complex interactions, such as the Two Urinal Tango.
I don’t know about you, but personally, I like to go to the bathroom not to think. I can only stagger at the amount of brainpower that’s currently going to waste in the world right now trying to figure out whether to take that free urinal or grab the available stall instead.
If it took that kid a lot to figure out that a dropping hat was funny, wait until he needs to go to the bathroom. If I were him, I’d stick to the diapers.