one phenomena i've never grasped is how people can manage to get so much urine on the floor when they are using a urinal. i've come to suspect it has a great deal to do with poor urinal design.
if you look at those small roundish urinals, i'll bet you notice far less piss on the floor than under the tall urinals. it has something to do with how far the little trough sticks out. while the tall-boy urinals accommodate a variety of user heights (what do you call people who urinate? urinators?).
for those not necessary with various urinal design, check out the american standard website and view the 'urinals'. these guys make the majority of the urinals i encounter regularly. while you would think these designs are pretty efficient, they still lead to major leakage.
men seem to be very sloppy and lazy when it comes to urinating (or, "taking a slash" as an aussie coworker used to amuse me by saying). sometimes one has to spread their legs far apart to avoid stepping in a giant puddle of other people's urine. is it that a few drops leads to a lot, or is it that a few people miss their target by a long shot?
i only care to know insofar as it leads to someone designing better urinals so i don't step in it.
...
well it's been a few days since i wrote this, and i've noticed that even the small bowl urinals don't do the job properly.
perhaps i'm missing the problem here - it's highly probable that the urinals are all excellent at doing what they are designed to do. it's simply that men aren't.
this seems like such a stupid thing to bother writing about, but when you are forced to side-step enough puddles of other people's piss you grow tired and irritable.
i'm going to get started on some kind of electrified floor design or one with sensors that makes a loud announcement when you've dribbled on the floor.
i'm not one for being a regular anywhere. in fact, i try to avoid it if at all possible. there is one place, however, where i don't mind being known by name when i walk in the door and where the personal conversation is easy and pleasant. that place is the barber shop in my neighbourhood.
for obvious reasons, i'm not fond of people whisking around my head with sharp objects. i've been nicked before at the barber, more than once, and am always a bit paranoid about losing the top of my ear to an absent minded scissors-snip. for years i avoided getting my hair cut, and did not look forward the prospect of going every month to have someone stab at my head.
my new hair cutters are quite good, though. the one that does my hair most is iranian. she is fast (frighteningly so), but i stare at the ground so it is fine. as long as i don't look in the mirror and see the reflection of the razor sharp steel by my head i'm good.
the curious bit about the haircut is the way she shaves my earlobes with her clippers. i'm not a very hairy man, so the first time she did this i jolted. she also has the habit of sticking the blowdryer down my shirt to get rid of any stray hair after she's done. it's all kind of odd, but amusing. and she knows more about my personal life than my coworkers, which is sort of weird. oh, and she remembers everything i tell her from month to month. it's insane.
actually, it's not really. now that i think about it you do remember peculiar things about customers. when i was a bookwhore years ago i recall once asking a guy about a martin amis book he had bought several months earlier. it spooked him visibly, and i tried to avoid creeping customers out after that with my encyclopedic knowledge of their reading habits. so i guess i do understand how such a boring job leaves you plenty of headspace to remember arcane facts about your customers' lives.
there's a great essay by dana gioia in a recent issue of the hudson review, entitled "disappearing ink: poetry at the end of print culture." (Volume LVI, Number 1 (Spring 2003)).
here's a brief sample of why it's worth reading:
The decline of print culture has been especially hard on literary poets since it has broken down the elaborate cultural machinery by which they once reached their audience. Traditionally a poet’s readership and reputation was influenced mainly by four interrelated factors—journalistic reviews, serious (usually academic) literary criticism, anthologies, and general press coverage. All four means of reaching the literary reading public have diminished notably in the last few decades. First of all, contemporary poetry occupies a much smaller place in the academy than it did thirty years ago. As literary theory and cultural studies dominate critical discourse, contemporary poetry becomes a marginal field. Attend an academic literary conference these days and you are more likely to hear, as I recently did, papers on the design of the Los Angeles Freeway system as an expression of phallocentric power or gender-coding in breakfast cereal advertising than you are to find examinations of contemporary poetry.
Second, much of the academic commentary on contemporary poetry is written in the professional language of academe rather than a public idiom. This mandarin code may offer certain advantages, but engaging the interest of the serious and intelligent non-specialist is not one of them. Third, the magazines that still review poetry are usually small, expensive, and hard to obtain. Anyone without access to a large university library will not be able to locate most literary journals, and even informed readers do not know of the existence of many leading journals. The traditional print medium has so conspicuously failed in this regard that most new literary journals are now electronic.
Finally, there has been a decline in the quality and seriousness of poetry reviewing itself. The few reviews written in a public idiom whether in literary journals or the general press are increasingly characterized by their blandly uncritical quality. Conscious of how little coverage new verse receives and how small the poetry subculture is, most reviewers avoid negative or skeptical assessments. Savvy readers soon learn to discount this overt puffery. Consequently, the reader seriously interested in following contemporary poetry finds that criticism now comes mainly in four varieties: invisible, incomprehensible, inaccessible, and insincere. Is it any wonder that most aficionados prefer to go to poetry readings and make up their own minds?
gioia does an admirable job of examining the realm of contemporary american poetry, what forms it is taking, and discusses some of the problems surrounding it. what is most remarkable is that gioia has gone about stating the obvious in a way that is well thought out, has a wide scope, and is capable of "engaging the interest of the serious and intelligent non-specialist". poets, academics, and general poetry enthusiasts should take note about what gioia has to say about the state of poetry.