EPTNow the odd little situation which I find myself a part of goes something like this... There are 2 toilets in our shared bathroom, just 2, and physically the toilets and stalls are identical. Yet somehow, through mutual psychic consensus, 1 of them has been dubbed the "piss bowl" and the other the "shit bowl". That is, I have never, this entire semester, seen the "piss bowl" with the lid (or rim thingy, or whatever it's called) down, and I have never seen the "shit bowl" with the lid up. Not once. And after realizing the unspoken pact I was a part of during the first few weeks of the semester, I have been diligently checking on both toilets every time I'm in the bathroom, even if I'm just in there to shower or brush my teeth. It has been 8 weeks and I have recorded no abnormalities.
Therefore I find myself astonished not only by the rapidity of the system's adoption, but also the complete and utter consistency of the phenomenon. With all the random people moving in and out of our dorm floor, you would think I would have recorded a deviation in a lid's position... I mean there are friends, colleagues, girl friends, fuck buddies, parents, siblings, just all kinds of people moving in and out of that dorm every day, and yet the position of the lids never change.
Recently I became suspicious that the lids must have been cemented down or something. However, my all too human mind was having trouble fathoming such power, such concentrated group psychology manifest. I knew it was not my place to move those lids... in fact, the whole system reeks eerily of religion. I could not bring myself to sin against such perfect coordination. So I waited, I waited for the one person with enough gall and ignorance to dare manipulate the sacred angles of those lids: the janitor.
So I waited carefully with a shared sense of excitement and foreboding... for about a week's time... and of course, sure enough, a Hispanic women showed up. Too riled up to feel the pangs of awkwardness this stereotype would typically inflict on me, I frantically dug through my drawers for every bathroom product available to me... So soon I stood there in the bathroom, alternatively brushing my teeth, applying facial scrub, and clipping my nails. I must have looked like quite the manic depressive metrosexual, but by this point my eyes were locked onto the position of the toilet she was cleaning while my hands and arms were moving with the determined, automatic drive of a tank's treads.
What did I see? WHAT DID I SEE? Bending over the "piss bowl" she skillfully relaxes the lid into that forbidden angle of pi over 2 radians with the dignity of a medieval nun handling a religious relic... and proceeds to clean the lid. Now what does she do? She does not get up and walk away. Oh no, somehow she knows! I don't know how she knows but she knows! My heart practically bursts out of my chest like a fucking xenomorph as she raises the lid to it's rightful, god given position. The rites have been observed today gentlemen, and those angles will continue to remain fixed, far after I graduate. Oh yes. And 80 years from now, when I return for one for flush, one more pilgrimage to the happy shitting grounds, those lids will still be fucking perpendicular.
