Appreciation and Puzzlement at the Urinal

I’ve been temping at a turtle breeding company for the past few weeks and have had the opportunity to enjoy the men’s room urinal. It’s a lovely contraption that whisks my urine away from me, to some place I can only imagine is a like a giant yellowish sea plagued with a foul stench. I wonder what sort of creatures could thrive there.

When I was with my elk family, we would pee and then leave the area immediately. With the urinal, I can stay put.

But what I’ve found most interesting is the little puddle that accumulates beneath the receptacle. How does this tiny pond get there? Last Tuesday I sat there for 15 minutes watching the urinal to see if it leaked. It did not. I had to leave when a co-worker entered the bathroom and informed me that he was uncomfortable with my watching him urinate. I believe his words were, “What the hell are you looking at Twig Head?”

After a few minutes, I felt it was safe to enter the bathroom once again. The puddle had grown! The leaking came not from the urinal, but from my co-worker. I was sure of it and felt no need to confirm with a sniff. How could this be? The urinal is designed so that your thingy can be very close to it and is wide enough to catch urine even if you shake around a bit. How could anyone miss? Clearly he wasn’t the only one contributing to the puddle. Is it laziness? A complete lack of penis-eye coordination? Puzzling.

But perhaps the puddle needs to be there. It serves as a constant reminder of the urinal’s value, a microcosm of what might be if our urine wasn’t flushed far away. And it keeps the janitor busy.