Ah, bathroom humor! Hard to get away from it. So…we’ll just go with it!
Once upon a time back in the dark ages, as a poor undergraduate social work student, I was employed part-time in the university’s sociology department to finance my education. My job was to assist the sociology graduate students with their research projects.
The old sociology building had originally been built to accommodate engineering students who, incidentally, back in those good old days before women’s lib, were all male. So the building was constructed four stories high with four men’s bathrooms and zero – yes, zero – women’s bathrooms. When the sociology department was created, the university decided to convert two of those bathrooms (every other floor) to women’s. In a budget-conscious environment, this meant that the changes were quite basic. On the women’s floors, the stenciled “MEN” sign on the door was covered by a nailed-on wooden WOMEN placard. Inside the newly-created women’s domains, new “necessary equipment” dispensers were installed so that the ladies would not be stranded without supplies in case of a surprise “visit”. And all four restrooms continued to have a row of urinals beyond the individual stalls, back-to-back with the sinks
Soooo…the graduate students were bored one day and decided to begin new research. The task was to determine statistically whether, in an emergency situation, people tend to base their decision-making on “past experience” or their “present stimulus field”. Hence, as the sociology lab was on a designated women’s restroom floor, the “researchers” removed the wooden WOMEN placard from over the MEN stencil on the door and stood in the hall outside the sociology lab. Waiting for subjects.
Well, it was summer, and the sociology building had little traffic, so the grad students were beginning to get a bit bored….when, all of a sudden, a young lady came down the hall and turned directly into the women’s restroom. Aha! So they waited some more. And, lo and behold, very shortly thereafter, a fellow came charging down the hall with a rather urgent look on his face, started to pass the door to the ladies’ room, glanced left, did a double-take at the door that said MEN, and made a sharp left into the bathroom. Yep! Pay dirt! Almost immediately the door burst open and the very red-faced young man lunged into the hall and zoomed for the staircase at the other end of the hall.
Before the young lady could exit, the “researchers”, stifling guffaws and giggles, hustled back into the soc lab and decided to conclude their research and abandon the project before they were thrown out of grad school. The results: 50% of the subjects relied upon past experience and 50% relied upon their present stimulus field in decision-making.
A note: we social workers are a compassionate lot and would not have put our subjects in such a compromising position. Sociologists, however, have different objectives.
A couple of additional rather unique bathroom humor stories remain to be recounted that were loosely connected to the university sociology department. One of the “extra” jobs that came my way working for the grad students (and the department in general) involved bringing lunch back for workers who had difficulty getting away but didn’t like packing lunches. About half a block from the building was Schroeder’s Pub, which happened to serve microwaved ham and cheese sandwiches which were amazingly quite tasty. So off I would go to fetch food a couple of times a week. Schroeder’s happened to be the oldest bar in the city and tended to be rather popular around noon with all the seats surrounding the bar occupied by the locals. What was eventually pointed out to me by someone was that Schroeder’s, as the city’s oldest bar, had been around since the really old olden days when apparently only men frequented the bar. A key historic feature of Schroeder’s was that the wooden bar had a trough around the bottom of it so that the men on the barstools would not have to leave their seats if the need for a restroom should arise. (So far as I know, they had installed actual restrooms in the place by the time I was on lunch duty. Thank goodness!)
An additional rather unique feature of my connection to the soc department, was that my first child, Kong (a one and a half-pound squirrel monkey) had to come to school and work with me for awhile because he had started crying when I would leave the apartment causing my neighbors and landlord to object). So Kong, who sported a cat-collar belt and lightweight leash to keep him out of trouble, would hang out, tethered to the leg of a chair in the sociology lab, when I had to leave the building. The secretary and grad students loved him, and the professors were amazingly tolerant. (Needless to say, certain health laws were not yet in place to preclude his presence.) One day, I returned from class to find open windows, no secretary, no grad students, no Kong, and open screenless windows. Panic!!! My baby is is swinging through the trees on campus never to be seen again. Aaaaaarrrrgggghh!! So I took off madly, to search the building in case he had strayed inside somewhere. As I reached the next floor, I saw one of the professors (a burly, booming man who terrified me) walking down the hall with what appeared to be a tail down his back. So I cautiously approached, and the prof turned around. Sure enough, Kong was riding on his arm, and there were dirty little foot and hand prints up and down the nice white shirt. Whew! The prof looked at me and said, “Well, the secretary had Kong on my desk for awhile, and when he did a number on a memo from the president of the university, I felt he was an incredibly intelligent monkey and should be befriended.” So Kong became a teacher’s pet, so to speak. Later in the year, when I discovered I was pregnant with my second child (a human), the prof would ask me whether I had prepared Kong for sibling rivalry yet. And months later, the daily question was, “How’s Kong’s little brother.”
Ah, college-level bathroom humor. Gotta love it!
That was a great story… remember the bar well.