This is a problems that guys face when they go into a public rest room. When women go into a rest room, they have the privacy of stalls, but guys have to do it while standing pretty much out in the open, sometimes with many other guys standing around.This can be tricky,because peeing is very much associated, in guys’ minds, with masculinity. Consider the behavior of guy gods, who spend their lives in a ceaseless quest to establish their masculine dominance by peeing on everything in the entire world. Scientists believe that the reason dogs howl at the moos is because they (the dogs) (also some of the scientists) are upset they can’t get up there and pee on it.
As noted, I own two dogs: a large main dog named Earnest, and a small emergency backup dog named Zippy. Earnest, a large female, pees only when she has to pee. Zippy, a tiny fluffy male, basically never stops peeing. He is like a small walking wad of cotton with urine constantly dribbling out of it. Sometimes he encounters the next-door neighbors’ dog, Prince, and the two of them engage in a pee-fest. They'll sniff each other of a moment, rush off in a purposeful manner to squirt various bushes, then rush back together to sniff each other some more, then rush to the bushes again, back and forth, a pair of leaking, low-IQ testosterone tornadoes, each one firmly convinced that he is the biggest, baddest stud on the planet.
My point is that peeing has significance for guys that goes way beyond the mere elimination of bodily fluids. It is an important territorial statement. This is why, every time a guy enters a public rest room, he must confront a critical guy problem; namely: Which urinal should he use? His goal is to avoid, at all costs, peeing right next to another guy, because they would be infringing on each other’s territories.
So in the idea guy restroom, urinals would be located a minimum of fifty feet apart. Unfortunately, in the real world, they’re right next to each other, which means the guy often must make split second strategic urinal decisions. To illustrate this process, let’s imagine a public restroom in an airport. Lets assume the restroom has a row of five urinals, which are represented in the following scientific diagram:
Let’s further assume that nobody is in the room when Guy A walks in. He is almost always going to choose one of the end urinals -- either no. 1 or no. 5 -- because he knows this will put him as far as possible from the next guy who comes along. Let’s say Guy A chooses urinal no.5, which means our situation is now this:
When Guy B walks in, he will always take no. 1. He would never, ever, in a billion years, take no. 4. To do such a thing would cause Guy ! to become alarmed to the point where he might zip up his fly so fast that he risks wetting his pants and possibly even injuring his manhood, rather than remain there. But Guy B will always take the far urinal; he may be a decent, secure, open-minded, non-judgmental person with absolutely no prejudice whatsoever toward gay people, but he nevertheless would rather poke both of his eyeballs out than have Guy A think he is one. So he will go to the other end. If the line of urinal were a mile long, Guy B might very well choose to hike the entire distance, even if this meant he would miss his plane. So now the situation is this:
When Guy C comes in, he will clearly choose urinal no. 3. He is not crazy about it, but he still has a one-urinal buffer on each side:
But now in comes Guy D, and he has a real guy problem, because whatever urinal he picks, he’ll be right next to two other guys. (PAGE OWNERS NOTE: Guy A is still taking a piss?) This is very upsetting. Some guys in this situation will choose to bee in an enclosed stall, or wait until there’s a buffered urinal available, or go way off to the side and pee against the wall, as follows:
If guy D does go to one of the available urinals -- say no.2 -- he and Guys B and C will stand rigid, staring intently straight ahead, as though the wall tiles were inscribed with a secret formula for turning Grape Nuts into platinum. DEATH BEFORE EYE CONTACT, that is the motto of a guy at a public urinal.
I realize that you women out there think I’m making all this up. But ask the guy in your life to read this section, and I bet he’ll nod in recognition. He’s been there, and he knows the behavior I’m describing. But he has never felt comfortable about discussing this subject with you, because this is an extremely sensitive area for him. Also he knows it’s stupid.
