Take It From a Pro…Do Not Go in There.

“Please don’t drink anymore coffee,” pleaded my daughter.

“If I don’t…I can’t stay awake. And then we shall perish.”

When driving long stretches, I drink way too much water, coffee and Diet Coke. My daughter equates summer travel with heading southward in a stuffed car coupled with a blur of public restrooms. At least my children are past the age of crawling under stalls and lying on the floor. But I have yet to figure out how to use a public toilet without actually using a public toilet.

Please don’t think I am being too hard on employees assigned bathroom cleanup. One person can do only so much with a squirt bottle of disinfectant and three-ply paper towel. A standard two-stall fast food restaurant bathroom just off the interstate was never designed to handle the volume of traffic that in two hours that would close many a theme park.

Here’s the ugly truth. If not their job to clean up a mess, the general public is akin to those rotund bovines at home in slop. That’s harsh. But spend a summer cleaning out public restrooms and you might think I set the standard too high.

In my long ago storied history of summer jobs, I once rented rafts at a major water park. Part of that responsibility included twice weekly sentences to cleaning up the main locker-room.

“What must these people’s homes look like?”

That’s the question we raft rental gals wondered aloud wearing our royal blue swimsuits, white tennis shoes and “Hi, I’m Jamie” name tags. We cleaned matter out of shower stalls that would have been put in a toilet in most developed countries. In fact, there was so much bathroom stuff going on in the showers, one hoped for the sake of humankind that people had become confused and thought they were in the bathroom part. The only bodily function that didn’t occur in those showers might have been birth. Notice I used “might have been.”

Then there was the morning I opened the rentals at the main wave pool. Walking into the open air shack on the edge of the huge pool deck, there was a pyramid on the floor next to the blue rafts. Not an Egyptian Giza pyramid as much as a ziggurat like those constructed by the Mesopotamians. Even for me (a seasoned waste disposer at this point), I wondered how a gargantuan German Shepherd leapt over the wall after closing into the raft room and relieved himself.

The lead lifeguard came in and rolled his eyes. “That clean-up crew. This must be their idea a joke.” Taking the broom and dust bucket from my hands, he tidied up the mess. With that heroic act of chivalry, he won a teensy spot in my heart for all eternity.

So next time you see an employee entering a public restroom, why not give them a big thumbs up and smile. And take it from a pro. Don’t give up too easily on a toilet that won’t flush. There’s no need to panic and flee. Just await a moment and give the poor porcelain time to catch its breath. Things will probably go down just fine.

Or better yet, don’t drink lots of water when traveling. Considering the alternative, death by dehydration might not be all that bad.