Back in the day, “going to the bathroom” meant squatting over a chamber pot, then tossing its contents out of an upper-story window and onto unsuspecting passersby on the street. (Sometimes, when I stay over at the Disco Biscuit’s third-floor apartment, and a car alarm sounds its cacophonous “whoooooooop whoooooooop WEE-haw WEE-haw WEE-haw HONK HONK HONK HONK” at five-thirty in the damn morning, I long for this airborne sewage system of yore.) From there, “going to the bathroom” evolved into a more expeditionary process: stumbling and shivering outside in the dead of night with lantern in hand, dropping the seat of one’s union suit in the pitch-black privacy of the outhouse, and hoping fervently that an enterprising member of the animal kingdom hadn’t built a nest in the hole since one’s last visit.

Fortunately, Sir Thomas Crapper saved us from these indignities by inventing the flush toilet. (No, not really, but I don’t know who did and I didn’t feel like phoning up the U.S. Patent Office and asking them to look it up for me.) Now, we can make a deposit, then push a lever and watch the fruits of our labors disappear. No more terrorizing innocent sidewalk denizens; no more fighting off clouds of flies; we live in the era of indoor plumbing. As with many of the good things in life, however, a few people ruin the fun for the rest of us by flouting basic bathroom etiquette. Perhaps you too have committed offenses against lavatory taste without even knowing it. Thus, I present a few tips for making the water closet experience more enjoyable for everyone.

AT WORK

1. Don’t use the “poo stall” if you don’t have to, well, poo. (For the uninitiated, the poo stall is the stall furthest from the door. Most people automatically select the furthest stall when they have to pinch a loaf, since they don’t want to give anyone the opportunity to identify them while passing by. The increased distance from the door also gives the loaf-pincher the illusion of privacy and security.) You will inflict needless performance anxiety on those who really need the poo stall.

2. Make a command decision about washing your hands, and stick to it. If you don’t feel you’ve sullied your skin, don’t bother; if you’d like to scrub up, go for it. But don’t do that wimpy “I don’t want anyone to think I have poor hygiene habits, so I’ll make a great show of running the water and wasting several yards of paper towel, when in fact I only rinsed” thing. We all know you don’t wash your hands when you have the bathroom to yourself, because we don’t either, so save it for the screen test.

3. Check for feet before ragging on colleagues.

4. If you must rinse out your dishes, please wash all food particles and sauce droplets down the drain.

IN BARS

1. Vomit neatly.

2. If you don’t want to sit on the seat, please show some manners and don’t sprinkle all over the seat either. I understand that you fear disease, and I don’t find the prospect of slapping my haunches down on the same porcelain as every other pub-crawler in the bar particularly appetizing either, but I stand five feet ten inches tall, so suspending my big white ass directly over the bowl requires a tensile strength that my thighs just don’t have. I beg of you – wipe off the seat.

3. Write graffiti and relieve yourself simultaneously. It saves time.

4. Bar bathrooms frequently run out of toilet paper. If you used the last precious square, do us all a good turn and inform the bartender that everyone else in line would like to squeeze the Charmin. And if you find yourself stranded on the pot with nary a foot of t.p., please don’t use paper towels, flyers, or old copies of the New York Times crossword. They clog the toilet.

5. Vomit quickly.

6. Gentlemen: if you see a female coming out of the men’s room, keep your so-called witty comments about penis envy to yourself, because unfortunately it takes us a lot longer to unbutton, sit down, whiz, wipe, and button up than it does for you to whip it out, whiz, tap, and tuck it back in, but architects and building designers haven’t clued into the fact that perhaps they should provide THREE women’s rooms for every TWO men’s rooms, and if THEY haven’t, your local pub probably hasn’t either, which means that certain resourceful chicks in your midst who do not feel EITHER like waiting until sunrise to urinate OR that they have to suffer for not having a penis will probably march in and use a urinal, and unless they cut in front of you in line, which they probably didn’t because you went outside to pee on the side of a car, don’t bother having a canary about it.

AT HOME

Ahhhhh – the home-field advantage. On your own throne, you can sit down with the entire Sunday paper, hurl one through the hoop, realize you only have a few shreds of Scott Tissue left, stand up, hop across the bathroom with your kit around your ankles, grab a fresh roll, hop back, finish the Arts & Leisure section, hear the phone ringing, hurriedly get cleaned up, lurch off the pot, realize that your feet have fallen completely and irretrievably asleep, and collapse in a heap on the bathroom floor, shrieking, “PINS AND NEEDLES PINS AND NEEDLES!” At home, you always know who used the bathroom before you did, and you have as much room as you need to hike up your tights. But before you get cocky, keep a couple of things in mind. . .

1. Just because you seduced someone successfully doesn’t mean you can stop cleaning your bathroom.

2. When you have guests, close the bathroom door. Just because you live there doesn’t give you the right to inflict the sounds of nature on everyone else.

You would think that most of these things would go without saying. In fact, many of you probably think these things should remain unsaid. But hey – that’s why they pay me the big bucks. Not.

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