I don't mean to sound full of myself but last week I took yet another business
trip--the second in four years. This time I stayed in a hotel, and the shower
in my bathroom had a kind of 'YMCA' design. Its floor was incorporated into
the bathroom floor, simply an extension of it, with the drain sitting in the
middle of the room. Of course my first thought was, "I could pee anywhere in
here." This was a powder room built with men in mind. Say nature calls while
you're brushing your teeth. Just pick up the phone, dude. No worries. Miss
the toilet during the night? Gravity is there to help. It's all good.

I know this whole "missing the toilet" thing is exasperating to women, so I
thought I'd try to explain how it happens. The problem is that toilets are
down, but at four in the morning men's bodies want to pee up. I won't
go into exactly why this is, but consider yourselves fortunate we're not
wetting the bathroom ceiling every night. Some of us have to walk backwards
at a fairly good clip just to avoid peeing all over ourselves. At best the
exercise requires a lot of isometric man-handling--a study in angles that
would rival any trig class. Under these conditions a few stray drops on
the tile is a pretty high score. The fact that we never hit the mirror is
a minor miracle, believe me.

So why don't we just sit down? Well, think about it. When you're sitting,
the toilet is even more below you than it is when you're standing the typical
distance of four to six feet away. This may sound like a big gap but after ten
or twenty years you can really get the hang of it. Take the least mechanical
nebbish, show him a loaded cannon in the field and he can tell you exactly
where that shell is going to land within about fifteen feet. He's been
conducting small scale ballistics tests every night of his natural life. This
is why women in the Army can never hope to compete with men for artillery
positions. When it comes to the angle of the barrel, recoil, the effect of
wind on trajectory--we have an intuition about these things that you could
never hope to touch, although a gentleman will often encourage you to try.

The other problem with sitting is that men will happily fall asleep in any
position. If you're skeptical that we could really do that on a toilet,
ask the nearest guy when he last nodded off while operating a motor vehicle
at high speed, and remember that a toilet is going zero and doesn't have a
clutch, except in North Korea. If he says it's never happened to him, he's
lying and you need to get yourself a better man, and if he says oh but it's
been a long time, I think my point has been made.

At least when you fall asleep driving there are any number of things that can
safely wake you up--mailboxes, unfortunate cows, Sean Hannity, etc. But the
only thing likely to wake a man sleeping on a toilet is a scream from poor
little Cindy Lou Who a few hours later. This is a much more dangerous and
emotionally scarring situation than a few stained curtains. So unless you
want to install a urinal in your new $30,000 bathroom, or let us go outside
in the driveway like we want to, I'm afraid this is the way things are.

Despite our incompatibility with toilets it's obvious men's bodies are more
practical than women's. Stand outside the rest rooms at Fenway Park, Faneuil
Hall, or any busy public place and you'll see a line of uncomfortable women
stretching down the hall, while men jog in and out their door without ever
breaking stride. At times like that we're quite happy with ourselves. In fact
we'll put our design up against yours any day of the week, or any night for
that matter. We're that confident it's the best.

John Lengyel lives in Cohasset.