TMI Thursday: Bathroom Wars - Men Vs. Women

Subtitled: Who's More Disgusting?

***Alright, folks, you know the rules. Join us all in humiliating the crap out of yourself every Thursday by sharing some completely tasteless, wholly unclassy, “how many readers can I estrange THIS week??” TMI story about your life. Or hell, about someone else’s!**

It's Thursday, and since I deprived you of a TMI Thursday last week, I knew I was due for one this week. I struggle with deciding on the best story to share with you all on a weekly basis. So, in order to provide variety, the spice of life, to my readers I got all introspective and shit and looked back at the topics of my past TMI Thursdays - pooping in public, peeing my pants, puking all over myself.... well I think I have my bases covered in the bodily functions genre, maybe I should give you a little change of pace this week?

Okay, so this week's TMI Thursday isn't really a far cry from my past posts: it's still about bodily functions, but for once it's not about my own.

If you read my blog regularly (and I know you do!), then you may remember that I worked as a bartender on my college campus in a past life.

Most of the bars on campus were pretty gross - bathrooms and the main bar area were never actually cleaned so much as hosed down. Would that make the person manning the hose a "hoser?" What up, Canada!

Anyway, the bar that I tended was just a tad bit more upscale from the campus dives - we were a sport-centric atmosphere, Bon Jovi blasting, mostly upperclassmen attending, generally well cared for bar. What that meant is that every night after last call, the bar would be cleaned from top to bottom: the glasses would be washed, the trash taken out, the bar wiped down, the floors swept and mopped, and yes, the bathrooms thoroughly cleaned.

Now, the main difference between the bar I worked for and our competitor bar across the street with the same atmosphere and clientele as our own was this: Our competitor was smart enough to hire a nightly cleaning crew. Our bar? Not so much.

So, who's cleaning the bathrooms you ask? The bartenders. And how did we decide who got the privilege of cleaning the bathrooms? Well whoever called dibs on the other jobs: washing glasses, windexing counters and mirrors, cleaning off liquor bottles? Well, whoever calls it, gets it. It's quite diplomatic. So whoever is the last to call a job for that night get's the shit end of the stick. Literally.

There were nights I easily called dibs and got an easy job, but I had my fair share of nights cleaning the loo. During the my stints cleaning the shitter, I made an observation.

Girls are WAY nastier than dudes when it comes to using the can!

At least at the bar.

I cleaned both the men's and women's rooms multiple times, and the men's room was NEVER as bad as the women's.

I am 100% positive that this is a direct result of the method we women must employ to take a leak in the gross bar bathroom - you know what I mean - the hover method. You muster all the strength and endurance in your quadriceps to hover in a half squat over the bowl to pee. Usually the pee just goes everywhere, all over the floor, the seat, and occasionally a little splash back onto your leg and/or jeans.

And if that's not tricky enough, sometimes you are so just drunk, and your quads are too tired, and your stilettos are too high, and inevitably the stall door doesn't lock, so while hovering you push your head against the stall door for balance control and privacy management. No? Just me?

Well like I said, the women's room was usually in much worse condition. How so? Let's do this in list format for easy reading!

Here is a list of the typical nastiness found in both the men's and women's rooms on a nightly basis.

Typical Men's Room Findings

• Puddles of water-pee mixture
• Toilet paper in the sink
• Empty glasses, usually with cigarette butts inside
• Pubes on the urinals - Guys? How does this happen? Are you standing there plucking, or what?
• Streaks of pee 4-5 feet above the urinal - Again, how does this happen?
• Empty Miller Highlife bottles filled with pee - I guess the line was too long?
• Occasionally some puke, but never too bad on the nights that I cleaned

Typical Women's Room Findings


• Lipstick kisses on the mirror - Must have been for me, they knew I'd be cleaning up.
• Pee/water combo on the floor - Natch.
• Empty glasses/bottles
• Improperly disposed of used tampons - Sure, you want me to pick up bloody tampons? No problem.
• Icky strands of long, stray hairs on damp portions of the floor or sink - I think I threw up in my mouth a little bit just now...
• Toilets overflowing to the brimming point - Where the water is level with the top of the bowl? You know.
• Overflowed toilets clogged with puke
• Lots of puke
• Overflowed toilets clogged with puke, with an entire roll of intact toilet paper placed on top - This was a common finding. Why? Do you think that by adding an entire roll of TP on top of the puke is going to disguise it? No. Wrong.
• Overflowed toilets clogged with puke and entire rolls of TP with shit on top - Nothing, Nothing like getting a cherry on top. Shit on top is the worst. Oh, I'm sorry, did you not notice the giant mountain of puke, toilet paper, and piss? Or did you notice and you thought that the only thing missing from this wonderful concoction is a steaming pile of human excrement? How very considerate of you to complete the collection.

Okay, now I don't exactly have a weak stomach. I've seen open pressure ulcers on hospital patients with oozing pus and bone showing through, incisions that are so badly infected that they smell like death when you remove the dressing, and I've been present during the changing of a colostomy bag - if you've never observed one, don't. The smell stays in the room forever. And that's just the tip of the iceberg that goes hand in hand with my job. So yeah, I don't get grossed out that easily.

But this one time... oh, this one time...

One night, the women's room had been trashed more than usual. I got to cleaning out the toilets, picking out the rolls of TP, emptying the trash bins, cleaning the mirrors, when I got to my final task: cleaning the sinks. Typically not a big deal - it's usually the toilets that are bad, and yet I've never had an experience like this even while cleaning the shit-on-top toilet.

On this particular night, in the sinks? Someone had been kind enough to leave me a mountain of vomit. Not a vomit foothill or a vomit dune, no. A vomit mountain. A vomit EVEREST.

And it was chunky. Like, I can tell what you ate for dinner, chunky. (Chinese food.) There was just no way that running the faucet would clear this bad boy out, which was my tried and true method for your garden variety of non-chunky (smooth?) puke. No, I was going to have to pull out the big guns. I was going to have to scoop.

I grabbed one of the empty glasses left on the floor and pulled the trash can over. I rolled up my sleeves and dipped the glass into puke mountain, and it made this *SCHLUUUUP* sound as the moist puke separated. I dumped it into the trash can. It made the *SCHLUUUUP* sound as it plopped out of the glass.

That was too much for me. I began dry heaving. I'd never dry heaved in my life, so this was a weird experience. Puking without puking? Whoa, blow my mind, why don't you? I took a minute and composed myself. I still had a good amount of puke to clean up, so I buckled up and went back to the trenches. I made my second scoop. And dry heaved some more. I made my last, and final scoop and tossed the puke and the glass right into the trash and tied the bag. I then Windexed the hell out of that sink and then promptly went home to shower off the ickiness.

So, was it worth it to keep working at that bar? Well, yeah. I got to drink for free and I made hella tips in cash, but I always tried to call dibs on washing glasses after that.

And on a final non-TMIT related note:

My dear friend, Miss N - I tried to post this to your blog, but it didn't work so here I am publicly sending you my wishes of encouragement.

In the words of the wise Rob Schneider, "You can do it! Cut his fucking head off!"