This is a rant about restrooms.

When I was a little girl, my grandmother instilled in me the deep fear of public restroom. At the beach, we'd be among the hoardes of women holding the auto-locking doors open for each other. 25 women and girls peeing for a single dime. You can't beat that for cost effectiveness. And then she'd take out her 'beach soap.' It probably had a brand, but it was small, round, patterned with something I remember as a Celtic knot, though I'm probably just mixing memories, and looked very much like oversized licorice candy. In my head, it even smells like licorice, but again, I may be remembering incorrectly. The soap would be wrapped in tissue at the bottom of her purse and dragged out (amidst grumbled complaints about the state of the bathroom) whenever a public restroom didn't have acceptable soap dispensers.

In any case, beach bathrooms are never the cleanest in the world, whether or not they try to make you pay a dime to use them, but a lot of that is because, you know, they're at the beach, and people are tracking in seawater and sand all day. And now that I'm older, they don't bother me as much as they did when I was five, and dreaded the command, “Crawl under and open the door for us.” I mean, really, isn't it worth spending a dime to protect an impressionable five-year-old from such a fate?

Office bathrooms, though. And restaurant bathrooms. Those bother me. A lot.

Our offices are in a buliding of rented suites, two floors around a central, open-air, atrium. All the office doors open to the balcony of the atrium. Two of the corners are occupied by steps, the other two by the men's and women's restrooms, respectively. I can't speak for the men's room, though the guys I work with tell horror stories, but the women's room is disgusting.

Apparently, most of the women who work in this building are unfamiliar with that element of modern plumbing known as the 'lever'. You know, the one used to actually flush the contents of…well, you get the idea. Apparently, they think their mothers work with them, as well, because they don't clean up. Anything. And while we have a cleaning service, they don't do much more than replace toilet paper (if we're lucky), and empty trash. I've seen them with mops, but have yet to find any evidence that mops were used, and I think 'sanitized' is a concept they can never hope to comprehend.

What annoys me about this is that we are, presumably, all adults here. Not even college students (though I have to say that my dorm-floor restroom was pristine compared to this, and Daisy, our housekeeper, even noted which way we liked the toilet paper rolls to hang, and turned them all that way) could be this messy, this gross. And not even busy fast-food restaurants, where at least the bathrooms get tons of use, are this dirty.

And there really is no point to this.
It's just really annoying me today.

I suppose I should count myself lucky that this is all I have to rant about today.