(no subject)

[oakenguy]

I really shouldn't be spending so much time puzzling over this, but it's just SO baffling.

This morning at work I was using the urinal. Someone else came in, and this was his sequence of events:

*He went to the sink and got his hands wet
*He and his wet hands went into a stall and shut the door
*He got some toilet paper
*He pulled his pants down


At that point I'd done all I needed to and headed out, but I've been scratching my head all morning. Why would you wet your hands before you go into a bathroom stall???

Comments

[hazliya.livejournal.com]

I knew a girl who did something similar. She was a little germ-phobic, so she'd at least wash her hands a little before going into the stall (didn't want to touch her junk with dirty hands) and use TP to dry them so that she wouldn't have to touch the paper towel dispenser.

Of course, there are other explanations, but that's what it reminded me of. =)

[plumtreeblossom.livejournal.com]

Maybe his hands were sticky from something he'd been eating, and he wanted to take care of that before throne time. When my hands are sticky from food I'll often just rinse them in water and not bother with soap.

[forgotten-aria.livejournal.com]

I like this theory. I've often wanted to get my hands clean of something sticky before touching my clothing.

[resk.livejournal.com]

I like the first two explanations better than mine. And for good reason.

My TMI guess is that some kind of liquid or quasi-solidish bodily discharge had solidified somewhere on his body and he was wetting his hands to dampen the toilet paper and wipe it off.

Hope that makes you sleep better.

[plumtreeblossom.livejournal.com]

That guess is far more creative than mine. You win!

Actually, I shouldn't roll over and give up that easily. How's this:

Too much kim chi the night before meant that the sneaky flatulence silently emitted into his desk chair was actually about a quarter-cup of liquid waste. Horrified, he stood up slightly and reached around to feel if there was a wet spot on the back of his trousers. There was indeed, and he'd touched it.

In prickling-faced emergency mode, and ignoring the innocent "Oh hey bud, got a minute to look at this spreadsheet?" from his cubicle neighbor, he gingerly rushed in a forced mince straight to the men's room at the other end of the floor. And goddammit, of course there had to be some guy there at the urinal; he'd hoped the bathroom would be empty. He worried less about any visible wet mark on his (thankfully) brown chino trousers and more about any smell that might be wafting forth in the urinator's direction. But before anything else happened, he had to rinse his befouled fingers off. No time for soap; that would come later, and in abundance.

Fleeing into a stall and slamming himself safely inside, he gathered a hasty fistful of toilet paper, dropped trou, and waited, willing the guy at the urinal to finish and get the hell out. He sensed that this colleague was monitoring him in some way, and he didn't like it. At length he heard a zipper ascend, and the bathroom door opening and closing. At last he was alone, but hurry he must.

Wriggling his pants off over his shoes, he beheld the vile travesty in his underwear. Removing them while avoiding touching the hazmat to any other part of his body was a fete for a contortionist, but he narrowly succeeded. If this mess had to happen, he'd dressed well for it today. The skimpy European-cut briefs that his girlfriend said made him look gay flushed right down the toilet without clogging it, and he set to work cleaning himself and his chinos up. The chore took five years off his life.

He would go home "sick" fifteen minutes later, and have a stiff bourbon much earlier in the day than he usually allowed himself. It was for the best that he never knew about his coworker from the urinal, blogging about him to a bunch of asshats on the internet.

*****
oakenguy, it's probably too much to ask that you still like me. But I can always hope.

[beowabbit]

Wow! I can’t speak for oakenguy, but I still like you.

[plumtreeblossom.livejournal.com]

AAAAAAAAH!!! I forgot you were on his f'list! You're my boyfriend -- you weren't supposed to see me talking about poop!! When you think of me you're supposed to think of wildflowers and Hello Kitty, not liquid waste!

*dies*

_{I hope you're still attracted to me!}

[beowabbit]

*Giggle.* I do think of wildflowers and Hello Kitty. But I am very glad that my honeywuzzle is just a little bit demented. It’s part of why we get along so well.

[reynardo.livejournal.com]

And I came here from a quite different source, and spotted you too. So CUUUUUTE!

[resk.livejournal.com]

I just friended you, for obvious reasons.

Before you friend me back, you need to know one thing: I was the man in that stall.

Not only that, but everything went down exactly like you said it did. Please stop stalking me.


Seriously, though, that was a wonderful, disgusting story. Well done. I may have gotten the facts right, but you definitely aced the fiction.

[plumtreeblossom.livejournal.com]

I friended you back! Looks like we have a few cool friends in common, too.

I love writing fiction; I just don't do it much anymore. When literary bursts happen these days, they're often for tiny audiences of one or two, like here. For some reason, I excel most at gross TMI imagery, but folks often feel weird reading that if it's written by a girl. Here's an actually-published one of mine in the same vein:

http://www.stwa.net/tsg/goodwill.htm
(safe for work except for the word "shit," and no malware)

[resk.livejournal.com]

Nice story. Sick, but good. I especially liked lying about having a dollar and fighting the urge to squirm.

I wish I wrote stuff like that. Writing a blog for 7 years has gotten me ingrained into a few particular (similar) styles. I'm trying to break free of that a bit by doing Script Frenzy, which entails writing a 100-page play during the month of April. Unlike NaNoWriMo -- where you write a 50,000 word novel in the month of November -- Script Frenzy allows you to write with a partner. So far, my friend atothek have written 35 pages, so we are -- amazingly -- on schedule.

Anyway, it's really freed me up from the writing chains that I've unwittingly bound myself in. And writing with her has taken a lot of the pressure off both of us. Also, she completed NaNoWriMo in the fall, where as I crapped out after only 1,000 words; so she is fully ingrained in the idea of just writing and writing and writing and not worrying about editing until later. I'm still in the process of accepting that mode of operation.

Really, with both NaNoWriMo and Script Frenzy, the goal is not to finish the month with something you can immediately send off to a publisher. It's pushing yourself to complete a first draft. Which is a good Goal Thought to default to when you're stuck.

Anyway. That was a lot of words.

[khep.livejournal.com]

I work in a dental lab, so I often wash my hands before going to the bathroom, because as far as I know a lot of the stuff I touch has residual Hep on it... but the paper towel dispensers we have are the motion-sensor type, so I don't have to worry about germs there. I don't like the idea of touching tp with wet hands because it comes apart so easy, but I have done it when there's only the air-dry machines in there-- were there paper towels?

[ngakmafaery.livejournal.com]

...if I had grub on them from something (food, whatever) and didn't want to waste paper, figuring the tp would dry them, OR if I wanted to then wet the tp and rub the seat before I sat down....OR if it was a sort of wanking ritual (my partner the psychologist sees a lot of that)...otherwise, *shrug*...

[reynardo.livejournal.com]

(Late reply, was stalking your journal after the metaquote thing). I have very very occasional cold sores, and they only ever turn up on one spot on my upper left lip. So on those rare days that one shows, I *always* wash my hands before going to the bathroom. And it has *never* spread.