Clean Like China

WARNING: do NOT read this blog if you are eating, driving, or praying. Do NOT read this blog if you are prone to sickness, including motion sickness, sleeping sickness, morning sickness, or if you are sick at heart.

Seriously, I have warned you. I do NOT want a bunch of vomit spattered emails asking why I can't write about things like daisies and funny things to do with chopsticks.

So, since we are on the subject of chopsticks, I've been doing some consulting in a lab. Without going into too much detail let's just say it's a lab that does scary things with radioactive materials. Needless to say, you need a lot of bright people to work at this lab to make sure there isn't a bad boom boom that might cause blight on the West Coast. So the lab is full of Chinese people, the second most intelligent race in the world, with the Jews being first of course.

So, I was in the bathroom brushing my teeth. My doctor TOLD me to brush my teeth after I eat and I am not being OCD so nip it all you climber guys who avoid the bristles like they cause plague. This Chinese woman walked in to the bathroom. I know she is Chinese because we talked earlier in the lunchroom (she was impressed with my pearls of jasmine tea, which she immediately recognized as coming from China, although, full disclosure, I was pulling them out of a tin that had Chinese writing on it).

The past few weeks I've been trying to figure out how the Chinese manage to trash a bathroom so badly. At my company kickoff in Paris I would walk into the bathroom and immediately be able to tell which stalls the Chis had been in. There would be toilet paper all over the floor. The seat would be up. There would usually be water (hope it was water) spattered on the walls. While talking to a UK consultant I was like "dude, wtf?" and he said "well, they are trying".

Back to the lab, where I noticed the same problems in the stalls, I couldn't help but glance over as this Chi woman walked into a stall. She didn't close the door. I saw her make a huge wad of toilet paper which she threw into the toilet. Then she flushed. This was repeated 3 times. Then she pulled a toddler sized wad of toilet paper off the spool.

NOTE: this is your LAST warning to stop reading

She then dipped the wad of toilet paper into the toilet water and proceeded to scrub the toilet seat and the bowl with it. I couldn't see how much of the inside of the bowl she was "cleaning" because of the angle of where I was standing compared to where she was. I did mention that this was a public restroom, didn't I?

I suddenly flashed back to this lovely Italian movie called Bread and Tulips (recommended by Nini, thanks Nini!) where the main character drops something in the toilet and is afraid to reach in and grab it. This leads to her being left by her bitch ass husband at a rest stop, and then her creating a new life for herself sans kids and aforementioned human tumor, oops, I meant to say "spouse".

Anyway, after scrubbing the toilet "clean" with toilet water, the Chi closed the stall door. I heard two more flushes. God only knows what happened in there. And then the Chi walked out without washing her hands. There was toilet paper all over the floor in her stall, some of which was accumulation from the cleaning, and some of which collected on the floor after the stall door closed.

A mystery that provided some answers, but that still leaves questions...