Leaving the Lid Up

by Dennis Green

“Leaving the lid up” has become the apocryphal emblem of how boorish men behave in the bathroom. Nothing gets said about the women. Until now.

The toilet in our house, (I don’t know about yours…), has TWO lids, one with a hole in it that you sit on and that conforms to your backside, and one that covers the entire porcelain throne. Well-trained, I always put the first lid down when I’m finished with my business standing in place, and the other lid too, because…

Well, because, if you have an electric razor, or a hairbrush on a shelf above the commode, and it happens to get misplaced and falls…and the top lid is still up…WHOOPS!…under water. That doesn’t seem like a difficult concept to grasp. Even I, a male in his advanced years, can comprendo.

But the woman who graciously allows me to share her bed and board, and bath, doesn’t get it. Or else, she’s just channeling a lot of male energy these days. For she rarely puts the top lid down, and we’ve both had more than one of the accidents detailed in the paragraph above. Rather than having a hissy fit, however, when I see the lid is up, I just put it down.

And moreover — way back in the early Sixties, working in a gas station in Berkeley — I learned more about the sexes than anyone would ever want to know. When it comes to the use of public restrooms, it’s the women who are the real little PIGGIES!

Whenever I worked the graveyard shift, I had to give the restrooms a final cleaning for the day. When I worked the opening shift, or the swing, I had to inspect the restrooms every hour to be sure they were reasonably presentable for the rest of the day. Never once, in the 330 days I worked there, did I find the women’s room with nothing seriously amiss.

Perhaps it was a rebellion against conventional habits, the fact that so many of our female customers had to keep and clean house at home. Maybe it was that part of town, the edgy borderline between big University Avenue and the flatlands below Sacramento Street. Maybe it was just a refreshing break from cleanliness being next to godliness that I saw.

But every day, the women’s head was an awful mess. In spite of signs warning them to the contrary, all manner of…things…were flushed down the toilets, often backing them up and flooding the restrooms. But some women also…how can I put it…missed the john completely. Leaving a mess on the floor. Others left things in the sinks that I wouldn’t have found in a biology lab, I swear.

As for the towel dispensers, the toilet paper rolls, the seat covers… forget it. Trashed would be an understatement. On those mornings when I opened the station hung-over, (Who? Me?), I’d have to gag my way into the women’s rest room. To this very day, I cannot understand that phenomenon.

And by comparison, the men’s rooms were positively DULL. Nothing out of place, no strange left-behinds, nothing exotic going on.

And what really puzzles me is why, in so many of the gas stations I worked, there was so often a hole drilled in the wall into the ladies’ room. From the men’s room, from the lube room, you name it. Why anyone would want a bird’s eye view of what was going on in there, I couldn’t guess. Not me.

So when it comes to the gender wars, and which sex is most hygienic, I’ll have to defer to the experts. From my personal experience, it ain’t us guys who have the real problems in that area, that part of the house, or the gas station. But who am I to say?

©2010 Dennis Green