Overheard at Table 5: First Time in a Gender Neutral Bathroom

 ... so I'm at the shoe store with my wife and I go to the bathroom.  First of all they've got one locked off and the other has a sign on it, printed from a printer on a piece of paper, saying GENDER NEUTRAL BATHROOM, and I'm thinking whaddoI care, I just need to pee...

and so I go in and it's a bathroom, like any other bathroom.  Got no urinal, but that's the only difference.  It's a bathroom, we should have had these things named like this all the time, I really don't know what all the fuss is about.

and so I do my business and then I try to flush the toilet and the water doesn't go down.  Fortunately there is a plunger next to the toilet so I use that, and that's when I find out that the water is not going down because someone has tried to flush what is described in polite company as a "feminine hygiene product"

... and my first thought is, 'is this what women have had to put up with all these years?  Using the bathroom and finding that the person before them tried to flush something that clogged up the damn toilet?!'

So I keep trying to flush, keep trying to plunge.  Thing keeps coming back.  So finally I turn the plunger around and pick up the tampon with the handle and launch it into the trash can (a three-pointer, by the way!) ... and voila!  case solved!

... So then I go out and tell this story to my wife, thinking that she will be impressed with my care and concern and taking care of the problem, but NOOOO! she's all torqued that I was fooling around with some other woman's personal product.  It's not like the woman was THERE in the bathroom with me, but suddenly my wife is acting like I'm cheating on her or something. 

Look, all I wanted to do was to make sure that the toilet was working for the next gender-neutral person who came in needing to take a whizz.  I didn't know that this was all going to be such a big hullabaloo.

Look.  Guy's bathrooms are simple: guys get in, do their biz, they get out. Sometimes there's a little bit of piddle on the floor, but you just stand clear, hit the target, wash your hands, leave.

If this gender-neutral stuff is going to get me in hot water with the wife, well, let's just go back to the guys and gals.  If we're not going to go back to that, then everyone:  THROW YOUR HYGIENE PRODUCTS IN THE DANG TRASH CAN!!