Golden Shower of Hits

I don't know how many of you are familiar with public men's room design (I'm thinking about half of you), but a lot of bars and restaurants place little ads or public service announcements over the urinals. The thinking is, you're standing there with an ad at eye level so even if you don't actually read it, it will stick in your head so you start to think, "Hey, maybe I shouldn't get a DUI," or "Man, nachos sound good right now."

So I'm in a restaurant Saturday night. Before sitting down I go to the bathroom. I see some ads and a couple photos on the wall to my right so I follow over and unzip. in the collection is a photo of three people, I guess a trivia team, called "He shoots, she swallows."

"That isn't very nice," I think. "I wonder if this woman knows she's in that photo above a urinal with that caption. Well, I guess she probably knew the team's name beforehand, so she knew what she was getting into. Hey, this urinal sounds funny."

Many of today's handless driers are actually less sanitary than paper towels.

I looked down. For the past few seconds, I hadn't been using a urinal at all, but a handless air dryer. Conditioned by advertising, I had followed the ads to where I had been trained to see them. I think that whole Black Friday had something to do with it, also.

I have heard stories of this happening to friends and family for years - where the person was either drunk or half-asleep or in a different house and ended up peeing in a chest or closet or something. But I was wide awake and sober.

Luckily the door was locked. I finished up my business in the real urinal and started gathering water and soap in my hands and splashing it over the urine-soaked dryer. I figured that would at least dilute it a bit. Now that I think about it, that probably wasn't the best idea I've ever  had, but I was panicked. I thought the next guy through the door would know that I had peed on the air dryer and ...
well, I'm not sure what they'd do. Probably force me to wear a big scarlet P for the rest of the night while I was shamed in the public stocks.

Luckily, no one was the wiser, and hopefully the puddle of water around the dryer discouraged others from using it for the night. Actually, it might have short circuited if anyone used it, what with all the liquid and soap.

I didn't say anything at all through dinner, and truthfully I kind of forgot about it until we were walking to the car and the girlfriend mentioned something about how cool looking the space-age hand dryers were.

"Uh...yeah. About those handdryers."

So gentlemen, the next time you find yourself in a public restroom, take a second or two to orient yourself to your surroundings. Also, you might want to skip the fancy handdryer and just use some paper towels or the back of your pants.

No Sleep Till Brooklyn

Sometimes my timing can be excellent. Last month I booked a trip to New York, sort of on the spur of the moment. I was lonely and bored in Jacksonville, and figured I knew a lot of people up there, so why not.

If you've followed my foolishness at all, you'll be familiar with my theory of how a weekend of hanging with friends and eating and drinking like a Roman emperor will jolt me out of whatever crappiness happens to be dragging me down at the moment.

For the most part, I’ve been doing OK recently. Sure, I have my problems, but nothing I’m really losing sleep over. This last week has been pretty stressful, though. It climaxed with the news yesterday that I will soon be taking a pretty substantial pay cut and having to repay some back pay, through no mistake of my own.

While it is novel to actually have a problem that can’t be directly linked back to some stupid action or character flaw of mine, that doesn’t isn’t really helping me feel any less poor and stressed.

But you know what? Screw it. I’ve got a credit card and a ticket to New York City. Sure, I’ll be coming home to minimum wage, but getting this news right before I leave will only make this visit that much more epic, even if nothing at all happens.

My vacation history is littered with pain, destruction and chaos. Will I injure any elderly French pedestrians this time? Get in a riot? Who knows? Thanks to work, I'm up for anything this weekend.