RECAP: I am in my office preparing to go to class. So far I have read my student-evaluations and was bummed by them. I felt resentful feelings towards those who get high student evaluations and called them ass kissers. I have concluded that I am not cute because I am old. I have decided I have time to urinate before I head out to class. But rather than go to the urinal, I describe my new environmentally responsible trash can. Having completed the description I return to the idea of going to the bathroom.
With 15 minutes till the hour, I have time for a pre-class precautionary leak and so head for the previously mentioned male restroom. I open the door and plunge into pitch black darkness for in 
addition to the new state of the art environmentally responsible urinal the restroom no longer has a light switch. It has a motion detector. One plunges into the darkness hoping to be detected. To make sure that I am I make wild gestures in the general direction of the motion detector.
Maybe I am wrong; perhaps it’s not a motion detector because I fail to see how it could detect any motion in that pitch black. For the restroom is like a closet with no windows. Perhaps it is a noise detector. If so waving my arms around in the air is not doing one whit of good.
In any case, the light comes on and I angle around the stall up to the new environmentally responsible urinal. Unlike any other urinal I have ever known, it does not make use of water. This does not seem like a particularly stunning environmental break through to me. The urinal seems to be coated with a super slick surface designed not to retard the flow of urine as drawn downward by the power of gravity towards the outlet hole.
Unfortunately, the surface does not work. Especially on warmer days and what with no way to get air in the place, the urine adheres to the surface and stinks. Some of us must have particularly adhesive or thick urine. In addition, to the frequently fetid odor emanating from the urinal, it appears to have a significant design flaw. A stream of any significance produces, when striking the super slick surface of the urinal, a ricochet spray effect.
If one leans back a bit, one’s clothes are not in danger of being sprayed. Unfortunately, the floor is with the consequence that the area immediately adjacent to the urinal is somewhat slick and I worry about slipping and wrenching my wretched right knee.
I don’t know why I have not contacted the authorities yet about this problem. I expect I will since I am usually the person who notifies the main office if something is amiss in the mechanics of our environmentally responsible building. For example the big door at the end of the corridor sometimes gets out of alignment and emits a horrible sound like the final squawk of a strangling sea gull. Three of us had to call before somebody came to fix that problem a couple of days later.
I also call when someone has jammed up the toilet. Usually, they come to fix this more quickly since a jammed up toilet in that little hellhole of a restroom can produce a rather stifling atmosphere. We are lucky, though, as I said, in that few students use our restroom. Once, when I was officed in another building, I frequented a restroom that was regularly used by students to throw up before going to class. Or perhaps upon leaving it.
To be continued
