On the road again

What — you have to go? You just went! Well, we have to fuel up anyway, so we’ll pull into that gas station up ahead.

Once out of the car, you unkink your legs and head into the convenience store. At the back is a door marked Women.

The washroom turns out to have two cubicles, and only one is occupied. So far, so good.

But wait. There are various reasons for stall vacancy. These include the dangling door lock, the non-flushing toilet, or the great big puddle on the floor. Not that you can’t work around these circumstances, of course, as any woman knows — any woman who has hung her purse around her neck, held her jeans off the floor with one hand, held the door shut with the other, and levitated above the toilet seat so as to avoid unwanted pregnancy or venereal disease.

Never mind, no such problems today. After you confirm that there is toilet paper in the stall, the next order of business is privacy creation. Normally women flush the toilet and hope for a long and noisy flush. But this time you can’t figure out where the flusher is located. After your tinkle, all is silent again. The person in the other cubicle is going to wait you out. She is just sitting there, scratching her mosquito bites by the sounds of it. She clears her throat. So much for a moment of privacy.

The plastic toilet paper dispenser puts up a fierce fight. In dragging a short piece of cheap, single-ply paper off the roll, you wedge it firmly into the corner of the dispenser, nowhere near the teensy serrated rim.

This pleated strand now has the tensile strength of a shopping bag handle. You yank if off, but now you have to try to tease some life — some volume — back into it.

Eventually you stand up, only to be blown back by the roar of a jet engine. The toilet has just flushed automatically. An inch further back and you would have been sucked into the vortex, headed for a giant sewage treatment facility in Lloydminster or Great Falls, Montana.

The sink features a faucet only, and a metal soap dispenser. Off to the side is an air dryer for your hands. The soap is pink and foamy, its fragrance eau de disinfectant. You squirt a dollop of the pink stuff onto one hand, and wave it under the faucet. Nothing. You wave both hands under the tap, and smack the tap in case it is sleeping. Just when you give up and decide to mop off the pink stuff with toilet paper, the faucet sprays out about half a cup of water.

It’s not exactly user friendly, is it? Your standard gas station washroom has been designed to disorient the hapless traveller. You can see why.

A normal washroom would create havoc.

People would just hang around for hours, doing hand laundry, colouring their hair or meditating. There would be lineups out to the highway. It just wouldn’t do.