Ewwwwww!!!

Actually the urinals at American locations are quite sanitary by many standards. And getting a little pee on your hands doesn’t give you the worst of diseases out there (heck, parents of infants would be diseased quite frequently on simple contact to pee or even poopies).

As far as gross is concerned, that ain’t nothing compared to the, well, I guess it is an outhouse, fairly well defecated spot at a train station in Busteni, Romania. Busteni is one of the most beautiful cities in Romania, nicely laid in the mountains just north of Bucuresti (as you can see in this great picture). However, this one outhouse had several inches worth of good old fashioned human feces strewn around. Yeah, not even touchin’ that one!

Urine may be pretty sterile between departure and landing, but urinals are not.

I stopped in Rock Springs, Wyoming to use a gas station restroom. The toilet had backed up and people just kept using it. They just kept “piling it on,” for lack of a better description. The general public can be disgusting.

Throw the glasses away and by all means stop telling people what you did, the sooner the experience drifts into forgotten memory the better.

Oh, PS, those of you who remember me telling this before, stop reading. When Sarah and I went to New York in 2005, she spent a couple of days in Bellevue quite ill and our trip was vastly different than we’d planned, to both our chagrin. I’ll probably never get over seeing her that sick.

Anyway, we got to the airport way early the last day because she was so ill. I laid my travel pillow and a blanket down for her and covered her up with another one and she just slept for several hours.

I got bored and wandered around. I went into the bathroom at one point, this is at La Guardia, and it was a pigsty. Well, I had clorox wipes, lysol wipes, paper towels and hand sanitizer in my bag. So I picked up all the garbage, flushed all the toilets and cleaned up that whole bathroom. I felt quite good about myself. I washed up good and went back to my sleeping daughter. It was my good turn, but not my anonymous one since I brag about it fairly regularly here.

Pretty cool, huh?

At one summer job, I had to hose out the restrooms at a high school stadium. Apparently, they hadn’t received a deep clean from the previous fall (but were still used — incorrectly — for track meets in the spring).

Okay, I’m truly shocked that nobody has said this:

Devyn, when a story starts out in an airport restroom, things are sure to go badly!

Nick - I was waiting for that one. Luckily, it was OHare and not Minneapolis and I was in a urinal with a narrow stance….

We were in Colonial Williamsburg and my 4 year old was wearing a tricorn hat when he went to use the restroom at Baskin Robbins. A few minutes later, he came out crying, without the hat, and his dad with him trying to calm him down– turned out that his hat had fallen off, and gotten caught in the crossfire before his dad could do anything about it. He told me the whole story through sobs– to the great amusement of our fellow ice cream eaters. (We bought him another hat.)

If there’s one thing I’ve learned from Bear Gryles (sp?) from the show “Man vs. Wild”, it’s that urile is sterile, at least when it is fresh. He sometimes drinks his own urine when there is no other source of water, or urinates on his shirt and wraps it around his head (including his mouth and nose) when in extreme heat. It used to be a great show before it got tame.

Don’t blame me, we crossed the line of grossness a while back.

Correction all: urine from a _healthy_ person is generally sterile.

I think my story is more fitting for this thread than the baby-thread. True story:

I had recently joined the church, and was in my mid-20’s. A single woman, a couple years younger, had befriended me and taken me under her wing.

I was sitting next to her in Gospel Doctrine. The seats were close enough together that while we weren’t physically touching, her dress was touching my suit coat.

On her lap she had someone else’s baby. I heard the sound of “moisture” against plastic and realized the baby’s diaper had leaked. This was back in the days before disposables were popular.

I looked down to see if the plastic pants were going to hold in the moisture. “Poor Sister B” I thought, as I saw the moisture leak out onto her dress.

But Sister B’s dress was polyester, and the moisture rolled right off her dress and onto my wool suit coat where it was immediately absorbed.

I looked up at Sister B, a former Catholic, and with a wry smile she difused the situation and elicited a chuckle from me by saying “Now you’ve been baptized.

Looking back, I’m glad that that baptism was not…

by immersion.

How about this:

This morning, at 3 am, I was changing our baby’s diaper and before I knew it he had urinated all over me. I was a bit shocked as he hasn’t peed during a change for weeks. Anyhow he got me pretty good, so I finished changing him and passed him off to my wife. I then took a shower. My wife thinks that I’m insane to take a shower. She thinks I should have just used baby wipes and changed my garments. I think she’s nuts.

This story just reminds me that in life, sometimes we find ourselves asking how such grotesque things manage to happen to us. We may try to be professional, poised, graceful, articulate, etc. - but too often events that normally would be simple, harmless, innocent - somehow work together to create a miniature disaster.

I’m a little bit amused at the immediate reaction almost all of us have when that miniature perfect storm hits - “did anyone else see this happen?” and the relief or horror that follows, depending on how that question is actually answered.

Devyn S.,

It could have been worse. Larry Craig could have been at the next urinal over.

ARJ - Amen - Of course his wide stance would have caused other issues…

Mike L. LOL—-I would never drink my pee on national TV!

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