Are You a DUMBASS?

Public bathroom etiquette is one of those tricky subjects. It looks simple at first, but then after living on the planet for a little while and gaining some experience, you realize that it is actually complex, no matter which gender you belong to. Which open urinal do you take? Which open stall? When is it appropriate to lock the door? Should toilet lids be left up or down? When and where in the men’s room is it OK to undo trousers so as to tuck in a wayward shirt-tail? If there is a line (or a “queue” if you’re British) to use the facilities, how close should one stand to the next person? Should one make eye contact? Talk about sports?

In the last few years a new flaw in behavior has become commonplace. I refer of course to the use, by men, of a toilet stall when performing a #1, rather than available urinals. Toilet stalls are for #2’s; urinals are for #1’s. Everyone should know this.

Anthropologists are using a highly technical term for the young men who are guilty of this egregious behavior: delinquent use of men’s bathrooms from arrogant and spurious shyness,” or DUMBASS.

Not long ago, i.e. just after the Eisenhower Administration, a guy who errantly used a toilet stall for a #1 would be taken outside and beaten with his own comb; often the perpetrator would be left completely covered in Brylcreem.

This is because of economic reasons, and as we all know, economics is involved with the management of scarce resources. There are almost always more urinals than stalls, since the likelihood of a #1 is higher than a #2. So if a young fellow chooses to take over a stall, that removes a scarce resource from use, and if someone comes in who genuinely needs a #2, that poor guy should be able to access it pronto.

The idiot who occupies a stall is a urinating usurper, and the error of his ways needs to be pointed out.

Since the beginning of time, men have treated public toilets in a laudably democratic manner. It was always first come, first served. You waited patiently for your turn, and then when you were done, you quickly washed your hands and moved out of the way. In large venues such as sports stadiums or bars, one often found long troughs in the place of individual urinals; one must use what one finds. Just as with a urinal, one took one’s place at the trough, unzipped, and went about one’s business with little fanfare.

There was always the suspicion of perverse deviance when a urinator claimed a stall when the other mainstream options were present. As mentioned previously, there used to be swift and decisive punishment for those who broke the rules of the group. It’s just like when a pack of hyenas crowds around a carcass to feed, it’s considered fair to settle in and start chewing what’s in front of you. Occasionally, a rogue hyena decides to break the rules, and snatch up the tastiest bits for himself; that hyena gets torn to pieces by the rest.

After the criminal hyena has been killed and eaten, the remaining pack members would go back to finishing off the rest of the original carcass. Then they would wash their paws and leave.

Interesting that very few DUMBASS’s wash their hands after going to the bathroom. These boys – they are not yet men – are cowards. They are afraid that someone is going to catch a fleeting glance of their fledgling manhood while using a urinal (oh NO!), and then, instead of washing their hands, they flee in great haste and great fear so that no one will see them engaging in what they see as effeminate behavior. Real men use urinals, and real men wash their hands.

Look at how clean mine are!

Phones According to Microsoft

What is it with young people and their phones?  They walk around with eyes glued to their phones as they text hugely important messages such as “I’m bored” to equally boring friends.  They no longer seem capable of walking upright, eyes focused on the middle distance, taking in the hues of sunsets and listening to birdsong.

OK, I’ll admit, I wish the implications of this phenomenon had been more apparent to me as I walked upright, eyes focused on the middle distance, since I would have purchased huge blocks of stock in the companies that make smart phones and the other companies that do mysterious electronic stuff that allows them to work.

Some years ago, I noticed that the first thing a student did upon exiting a classroom or a building on the college campus where I taught, was to produce a cell phone and call someone.  When I scooped up discourse with my very big ears, I heard fascinating conversations involving the speaker’s location, the fact that they had just finished class, and that, oh yeah, they were bored.  (When we were kids, my parents used to tell us that if we were bored, we weren’t trying hard enough to find anything interesting to do, or to read, etc; the message that stuck was not that we were bored, but that we were boring.)  The lesson learned by this observer was that the phones were in constant use.

Also interesting is that a theoretically average student didn’t carry their phone in their pocket, purse, back-pack or briefcase – no, the phone was always in their hand.  The phone was so important to them that to keep it elsewhere would amount to milliseconds lost of precious time getting it out!  “Take it out of my pocket?  Are you kidding?  Why would I put it in my pocket?”  Since then, talking to someone on the phone is no longer critical; it’s texting that counts.  When the latest text comes in, they have to look at it right away, no matter how banal or dull.  The message itself is not what is important; it is the connectedness that counts.

After lurking hungrily in the shadows, Microsoft has finally come to the party – wanting to be the main guest, of course – with their take on what smart phone software should be.

Microsoft’s commercials emphasize this, but I’m not so sure they are as effective as they intend, and these commercials still strike me as creepy.  For example, for those who have not yet seen the “Really” commercial, people go about their business, eyes glued to phones and walking heedlessly like technically advanced zombies.  Inevitably, like billiard balls put into play, these people collide, crashing into one another like dominos, if dominos could wear sweat suits, cocktail dresses or business apparel.  Many phoners are so distracted they miss out on important things: the guy in bed who misses the vision of his lovely wife presenting herself in a little negligee; the surgeon who doesn’t notice his patient; the diver oblivious to the shark approaching yummy dangling feet.

One guy is in a bathroom, using a cell phone while standing at a urinal — I have actually seen this happen — and he drops his phone you-know-where.  The guy standing next to him looks at the guy with disgust and says, “Really?”

As related to me by a friend who attended the Microsoft product introduction at a Boston hotel this week, Microsoft’s intention is to tell us that their phone software is so much more intuitive, and so much better than the competition’s, that you’ll be in and out more quickly, allowing you to come back up to the real world’s surface, where you’ll be able to resume a life.  But aren’t they still just encouraging us to use their phones?  So users are still going to be walking along, eyes glued to their phones, until they hit a phone pole, disappear down a manhole, or crash into me.

My money is on a much-rumored new application for smart phones, the “killer app” that shows you on your phone, with crystal clarity, what is in front of you.