The Alpha Splash Club
I am not one for crackpot theories, but bring me an armchair anthropological study any day.
Where I work, the men’s bathroom is a kind of thoroughfare. Bustling as it is, one is privy to certain usage patterns in the citizenry, such as the drippers, or the chronic spitters, or even the cell-phone talkers (they exist, trust me on this). No habit, callous or not, goes unnoticed in such tight quarters.
We share a floor with a sales firm whose male personnel can only described as relics from a bygone era. They resemble early prototypes for the chauvinistic salesman. Brusque and belligerent, these guys whip in and out of the bathroom, talk shop, comb their slime-slick hair, snort and sniffle, and crack ex-wife jokes. These are the men for whom toilet golf and the butt-face towel were invented. They wrestle each other in the elevators, and drive home to their wives expecting a baked ham on the dining room table by the time they walk through that door.
I go out of my way not to interact with these gentlemen, but I do, behind the guise of a straight face, study their behaviour. And I have noticed a habit that, while inconclusive, definitely holds clues to the salesman condition. And that habit is this: when employees from their company use the urinal, they tend to pee directly into the little pool of water at the bottom of the urinal, in order to make the most noise.
This is no accident. To hit that spot, they have to aim, deliberately and intently. They pee to relieve their bladders, but also to alert neighbouring tinklers of their continuing presence. Their behaviour is universal across the company, and they make no efforts to hide it.
The employees of my company are a different bunch. Tech workers, too immersed in code, introspection, and anxiety to think of strutting and preening in an irrelevant place like the bathroom. They do their business and get out, taking care not to pee into the water, not even once their stream has begun to sink into a dribble. This behaviour, too, is a universal, even moreso than the first.
These sales guys are also among the most likely to walk in pairs into the bathroom mid-conversation, enter one stall apiece, and keep on talking. Stand-up peeing in a stall with the door open is not uncommon, nor is whistling a ditty at unacceptable volume during the act. We are clearly dealing with parallel universes of decorum. One group of people tries to treat the bathroom like a quiet home, the other group like a roadside ditch on the Trans-Canada highway situated approx. at Gananoque, ON. But the sociological aspect—the need for enormous, sweating apes to assert their presence among the smaller males—is the more interesting puzzle.
Could there be an alpha-male tendency at work here? To paraphrase, if a salesman is alone in a bathroom and nobody’s around, does he make a sound? Conversely, if a tech worker pees alone, does he pound that water like a Bergereault glockenspiel? Vital questions, these.
I have no answers except what my gut tells me, and that is a leader-of-the-pack mentality, possibly reinforced by years of sales school. In any case, I am proud to have contributed this nugget to the collective wisdom, and hope that whether noisy or nice, your tinkles always hit their mark. Godspeed.
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(7 comments)
So I’ve got to take this serious crap and I decide to print your latest blog spot and take it with me. Half-way through with my feet propped up against the door and the vein in my head about to pop (I should have taken a lamas class) some beta-male walks in and starts a slow dribble! Everything goes absolutely quiet. No more grunting screeches from me as I pass pain threshold for 14 foot shits and not a whisper out of our bowl splasher! And then all of sudden I couldn’t take it no more…
Taking about different groups of people, I’m talking about Managers, in particular the one I report to. When I first started working on contract for this company he told me he went to school to learn computers. What a lie!!! He didn’t know that the information displayed on an AS/400 screen comes from a file. I finally caught him in a lie and he admitted that he dropped out at the beginning. I personally think he made it up so I would have more respect for him. All I think is that he is a fraud and a liar. He also always copies(word for word) the explanations that I send him E-Mails. Always taking credit for my work. One day a guy called him a computer genius. When he walked into my office I asked “how’s the computer genius” He was speechless and ran to speak to the the guy who said it. I never heard him pee (thank goodness) but I’m sure he’s in the same category as the salesmen.
I am pleased to have inspired a little field research in the field of noisome peeing. Please keep a detailed logbook and fill me in on your findings.
Odd that you write this story… just several days prior to its creation I encountered one of the aforementioned cell-phone talkers. Not only was he using his cell-phone, but his cell-hone was a Mike (yes I work for TELUS) which is basically like having yourself on speaker phone.
As was obviously required, I took it upon myself to teach this poor-mannered cell-phone abuser a lesson. I can only describe the contents of my bowels with two words – chinese buffet. Hell hath no fury like a man’s bowels after chinese buffet while trying to teach a man on speakerphone a lesson.
The lesson was a partial success… the man quickly switched to private mode and continued. I made sure a waft of uncomforting stench was available to constantly remind him of the lesson he had just been taught.
One last note… being a successful salesman myself, let me introduce a far superior technique to peeing on the urinal cake to maximize noise.
When peeing stand far enough away from the toilet such that it makes everybody else around you uncomfortable with your obvious superior-sized penis. Make sure you make small talk and pat backs while doing this. If you have the ability to do it… go no hands while standing far enough away and put your hands behind your hand and yawn.
The women’s bathroom at my old job was like that, women hanging out in there, puking receptionists, women who wouldn’t touch hte bathroom door without a paper towel, and one inexplicable woman who would eat her lunch on the couch.
Dianna: a guy I went to school with swore that at least half of all women’s bathrooms contained couches. Please confirm or deny.