A Little Bathroom Humor

"I sure wish you'd been at the hospital with me the day of mom's breathing test!" my sister said when I saw her the following day. O.K., pile on the guilt, I thought to myself. I miss one appointment because I was teaching my cake decorating class, and here we go...

"You would really have had something to write about!" she exclaimed.

Rather than laying on a guilt trip, she proceeded to relay a story about a trip of a different sort that didn't go so well. Specifically, a trip to a public restroom.

"It was one of those bathroom doors that swings in and out," she began to explain.

"You mean the stall door?" I recalled a bathroom stall door in a Macy's store in Boston that swung outward as well as inward, and almost getting chopped in the clops walking past it as a woman apparently kicked it open from the inside after she finished her business, rather than gently opening it. The other annoying aspect I recalled of the outie/innie door was having to line it up perfectly with the frame in order to lock it.

"No, the door to the bathroom itself," she explained. "There was no stall! Just a huge room with a toilet on the far wall."

And with the stage set, she went on to describe what is not only my, but probably most every other woman's worst nightmare - suddenly having an audience while making potty.As she tells it, she went into the restroom, closed the door behind her, turned the latch, and got comfortable. Within seconds, she noticed the door very slowly beginning to move. To her horror, she realized that the door not only didn't lock, but somehow it didn't even latch.

"All I could do was watch it," she said. "I was going!" she exclaimed as the door inched open like a scene in a grade B slasher movie.

Within moments the door was wide open. A female employee walked past. She didn't appear to notice my sister who was still humbly detained. Or maybe this happened so often the lady just got tired of giving the door a courtesy kick. Being a swinging door it would have just swung all the way in, anyway, probably hit the wall and swung back out.

"I could see all the way to the end of the hallway," she said.

"I was trapped like a rat," she said, shaking her head.

"Then," she continued, "I was afraid to move."

"You mean you had to, you know, finish? With the door wide open?" I gasped, afraid to know the answer.

"Of course I did!" she shrieked.

By this time I was doubled over. My sister, not quiet as amused.

"It was awful," she groaned.

It suddenly reminded me of one of my own public restroom misfortunes.

"Did I ever tell you about the time I came walking out of a restroom with one of those paper toilet seat covers hanging out of the back of my pants?" I asked her.

O.K. Now she was laughing.

I guess sometimes it just depends on where you're, um, sitting.