I am a woman. And as a woman, I think I probably have a good idea of how women go to the bathroom. You enter the stall, and in some order you pull down your pants, put a paper liner on the seat (this may or may not be optional, depending on how many times your mother drilled "Don't forget to paper the seat!" into your head when you were young), and then sit down. At this point, the buttocks should be firmly on the toilet seat, and then you begin your business.

It seems so straightforward and simple, wouldn't you agree? So why is it that a significant number of women out there cannot seem to figure out how to go to the bathroom? Why is it that half the time I enter a public bathroom stall, there is pee on the seat?

I know that it would be easy to simply blame this on little children, since the smaller tykes probably have a hard time fitting both buttocks on the seat and might tend to piddle a bit in the wrong places. But I know that the sole source of misplaced pee cannot rest solely on the shoulders of the young. This is because I have entered stalls after adults have left, to discover that the seat was not left anything remotely pristine. And unless those previous adult users somehow achieved anti-gravity and hovered a safe distance above the toilet so as to not disturb the already-present puddles of pee, they're the ones responsible.

What are these women doing? Do they do some sort of little dance on the seat as they pee? Do they perch over the seat so as not to sully their delicate hienies with someone else's butt cooties (see aforementioned comment on anti-gravity and hovering)? Do they just not *see* the puddles when they stand up? Do they forget to wipe and just swoosh their bare tush around in the air, hoping to drip-dry?

I can understand the reasoning behind the women who leave piles of soggy paper towels on the sink (because after all, it was too far for them to walk the extra two steps to dump the towels into the garbage). After all, in some groups, there is this feeling that public places can be treated as one's own personal pigsty, and that the maid will come in and clean up after one later. This is, unfortunately, true in the sense that most public places have cleaning crews. But they don't tend to lurk around the corner, just waiting for the next slob to pass through so they can sweep up after them. And they certainly don't have monitors in the stalls in the event that someone misses the seat.

This has been an AlphaBytes entry.