Tales from the Urinal...Part 2

It is still, to this day, one of the most bizarre incidents I have ever witnessed.
It took place in the men's toilets at Manchester Airport...which does sound a bit dodgy, but bear with me.
I think it was some time in the late 1990s - I may have been taking one of my fairly frequent trips to Northern Ireland, but I can't be sure.
Anyway, I had settled myself down, standing at one of the urinals, enjoying the pleasant relief of a pre-flight bladder evacuation, when I noticed that the man to my right (two urinals along) was staring vacantly at the ceiling as he too availed himself of the opportunity to relieve his own bladder before taking to the skies.
The bizarre thing was that, in staring at the ceiling, he was leaning back a little, and in leaning back, he was merrily pissing all over the floor.
After what could have been ten or twenty seconds, he finished, whereupon he gave a little shake, tucked everything away, pulled up his flies and vacated the premises, leaving behind him a pool of piss on the floor and at least three other gents staring in total disbelief at what they had just witnessed.
I am pretty convinced that the man was absolutely oblivious of the fact that he had managed a full urination without actually getting any of his urine in a urinal. He may, of course, subsequently wondered why his shoes and the bottom of his trousers were damp.
To this day, I have no idea why I didn't shout 'Whoa, man, you're pissing and missing!'
I also find myself wondering how many times this man repeated his piss-pool-creating antics before either someone more bold/less shocked than I pointed out the nastiness of what he was doing, or he himself became aware of it. If he did notice it himself, how embarrassed must he have been.
Bizarre!

Tales from the Urinal...Part 1

I have come to the conclusion that there is no greater feeling of helplessness that can befall a man than the moment when a urinal at which he is happily having a pee decides to start its own self-flushing ritual.
As all men know, a full urine-stop mid-flow is a virtual impossibility (achieved only by a select group of Tibetan monks), and there are inherent risks in significant position changing whilst underway; so the terrible series of worries and uncertainties that inevitably follow the sudden gurgle of pipework and the subsequent sound of rushing water cannot be avoided and simply have to be endured.

The biggest fear, of course, are mini-splashes, those annoying spatterings of the crotch area with little droplets which, though individually insignificant, can amount during a a serious urinal self-flush to a large and embarrasing wet patch which suggests a serious bladder control problem. These mini-splashes can have a number of causes:

• flushing water pressure too high
• interaction of the flush-water with an excess of those yellow toilet blocks that smell okay for a day or two but after a week smell only of concentrated piss
• incorrect flush-water entry angle resulting in flush-water not being contained by the urinal design

all of which are outside the pee-ing man's control, and all the more worrying for that.

There is also the subsequent concern about urinal over-flow, when the raging torrent that is the self-flush simply overwhelms the urinal drainage system (because it's blocked by an unsightly mass of discarded cigarette ends, chewing gum and pubic hairs) and ends up gushing all over the floor and splashing up on shoes and trouser bottoms (again suggesting the individual has either bladder control problems or poor aiming capabilities).

It has, of course, long been suspected that urinal self-flushing systems are now being specifically designed to start operating exactly nine seconds after a man has stood in front of the urinal, in just the same way that the urinals themselves are being designed to maximise urine splash-back, all part of a world-wide plot by the manufacturers of black dye to instil in all men an inherent mistrust of any sort of light-coloured trouser material (especially light grey).