We had other toilet issues at that company. The women secretaries complained that delivery drivers were using the lady’s room and fouling it up. We did this out of necessity. Time is short for delivery drivers. If somebody was using the men’s room, we had to use the lady’s room—some of those old guys could spend hours taking a crap (plus there was that weird guy who always celebrated when a vehicle turned over 100,000 miles on the odometer—who knows what took him so long in there?). Teachers, who have only passing time to do their business, do the same thing in using whatever bathroom is open. Nevertheless, I feel sorry for the women who face dirty bathrooms, and I do my part to make to make them cleaner.

Back to the pre-crap ritual. With Jack in mind, I usually wipe the floor in front of the toilet to make sure it’s dry. As an alternative, when I’m wearing shorts, I have in a pinch just rolled up my shorts and underwear, tucking in this and that corner so that nothing will touch the wet floor (this is especially useful when you are at a bar and the bathroom is sopping wet all over—let’s be realistic—some jobs are beyond my toilet paper-wad technique).

After having dried everything, if it is a public toilet, I go about covering the toilet seat with toilet paper—a time honored ritual as evidenced by the creation of manufactured toilet seat paper covers (these aren’t so reliable, and I find that one size does not fit all—I either skip these entirely, or compensate by adding toilet paper to any uncovered portion of the seat). The covering of toilets is an interesting phenomenon. It’s something like a placebo. Deep down inside, we know that toilet paper is completely porous, and that it can’t stop germs. When you go to a friend’s house do you shield that toilet seat with toilet paper? How many asses have touched that toilet seat? How about the one in your house? Is the ass of someone you know any cleaner than the ass of some stranger? Do you even know where your friends’ asses have been? Perhaps they didn’t use the toilet paper shield when they were at the gas station, and now they are transferring those butt germs onto your toilet. It seems to be more an issue of numbers. I can tolerate a toilet seat that has 10 or fewer butts that regularly touch it. But also, there is something disconcerting about strangers. Somehow we irrationally trust that the people we know have cleaner butts and crapping practices than the people we don’t know.