Fortunately when I was a young pup, my parents taught me the
value of reading along with eating so with every Pop Tart consumed, also too
was a paragraph on high fructose syrup and preservatives. I soon developed a
rather extensive vocabulary in all the ingredients crammed into Lucky Charms beyond
the oats to make them ‘magically delicious’. This early education came in handy later when
I finally ventured out on my own in the world by 50 years of age looking for
things to read, eat, and eliminate all at the same time.
Naturally at least part of this skill has proven helpful in
navigating the ways of the world especially when I travel. No it is not often I
find a full place setting in restrooms or an edible morsel that has not already
been passed over by vermin, but frequently in foreign lands it is important to
read and enter the correct gender door to the toilet. With this in mind, why
then is it so difficult to mark doors properly and legibly so that anyone -
blind, dumb, or confused (or all three like me), can determine their gender and
choose an appropriate loo to lounge
in?
While I have accepted the dull lanky stick figure form of
the male, and equally uncreative female stick icon in a dress as the representative
placard for restrooms in America, it is not necessarily so overseas. Other
countries prefer to reflect the fact that people often have tiny heads in
comparison to their bloated bodies, and depending on how much spicy curry
slurry they’ve consumed they might be in a blurry hurry to find the right water
closet fast. So if this is true, why are their icons so confusing to my
uncreative mind. Is the restroom for males the ‘fat running blob in a hat’ or is
it the ‘jumping blob with a sack’ – and who knows which room is outfitted for
babies since by definition all babies look like blobs?
Forget this Mars and Venus stuff since nobody really knows
the gender of any planet. I don’t really care what the RIGHT symbols look like
as long as if we can just agree on choosing ONE universal standard to read that
applies to the appropriate gender in question. I’m not really worried though if
I wander into the wrong toilet as I reach advanced age as long as I only travel
in Spanish speaking countries. Because at least there nobody’s offended if we geezers
misread the signs between the Senor or Senores, because when you gotta’ go any port in
a storm is OK, when you have a ‘SENIOR movement' !
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