By Karolina Kezdi

Loo rules

The life-changing point in every little girl’s life is when you are too heavy, and your mom can’t hold you above the public toilet in the gas station anymore somewhere halfway to the Italian Alps.  

The rules are simple:

(please try to read it on my mom’s semi-tensed tone)

1: Even if you don’t have to pee now, try it.  We won’t stop anytime soon.

2a: Don’t sit down unless you have cleaned the seats and have covered it all with toilet paper.

2b: You don’t want to get those serious infections which your mom can’t name but you definitely can get if you sit on that dirty seat.

(Fun fact: “Public lavatory might get a little grimy, but they’re very unlikely to pose any threat to your health. Most bacteria that could be any danger to people perish quickly on barren bathroom surfaces. So the restroom isn’t that dangerous, the organisms which can grow there have a very low probability of being able to cause an infection.”

I don’t blame you Mom, I haven’t googled this earlier either.)

3: Learn “the pose” and skip point 2. a. because girls can also pee stood up.

4: Hold my bag please, I had to as well.

And I undoubtedly followed the instructions in the last approximately 22 and a half years and that wisdom has been a critical pillar for me. Every single time when I drink beer and have to stand in the queue, every ten minutes, when I come out of the film in the cinema and when I beg myself into a cafe just to use the ladies’ room.

But Mom forgot to share the legal small print.

All cabin is taken. You have to wait and it’s cruel because you are in need. When it’s finally your turn and you try to squeeze yourself in almost simultaneously with the woman who is coming out to avoid touching the door. For the same reason you try to close the door with your leg. You realise the lock is broken so you have to sacrifice one of your hands to hold the door, but before that you try to keep it closed with your feet while taking off your coat. The hook is missing so you hang your bag on your neck, grasp the coat with your armpit, pull your tight off carefully and you POSE. If you are lucky your leg won’t be shaking but you’ll feel something warm trickling down your thighs. You could stop it if you grabbed some paper before it could reach your shoes, but the toilet tissue holder is empty. You look around,  maybe there is a spare roll on the top of the toilet or in the window. No luck, maybe next time. So you’re trying to find a tissue in your bag (hanging in your neck) or in your coat’s pocket (which you’re grasping with your armpit). Probably you haven’t prayed hard enough for anybody not to try to open the door and see you in that posture, because a woman just did that quite energetically and widely, so now everyone else in the queue knows that that cube is taken. She screamed a pardon and shut the door. Hold it again. Back to the tissue. Found one. Dress up. Flush.

Everything is wet outside, so you’re still grasping the coat and the bag with your armpit and try to wash your hand like a baby sequel or a T-rex. It takes at least 3 minutes until you finally find out how the tap works. Using the hand dryer is taking ages and you’ve read somewhere it’s full of bacteria. You won’t use a whole tissue for this either, so you’re just wiping it into your dress and trying to get out of the washroom without touching the dirty public door of the dirty public latrine.

*Check your sole. Toilet paper alert.