Rickresource Rickenbacker Forum

While it is a common practice in most airport bathrooms in the USA to tap with your foot and signal with your hand to the occupant of the adjoining toilet stall in order to conveigh the message "Pardon me,there is no toilet paper in this stall.May I please have some of your." you should never use these signals when at the Minneapolis/Saint Paul Airport as these gestures have a totally different meaning there.Uffda!

Yeah. And I've got a bridge for sale (NOT in the Twin Cities!).

Maybe the rules are different in Utah.
A universal rule:
Rule 1: Never look down while peeing into a urinal.

Don't look down?

But, to quote Lennon, "you don't know what you're missing."

I think Dave meant: "never look down AND TO THE SIDE while peeing".

Some people don't like that....

I look down for reassurance.

NEVER to the side.

In squirrelier days, I used to stare at the guy next to me just to crack him up. Never got punched for it.

A real icebreaker, that.

Getting back to the original post, what do these signals mean in Minneapolic/St. Paul?

Some might ask ask "Do you have a wide stance or are you just happy to see me?"

I must be frequenting the wrong airport bathrooms, but I was unaware of the signaling protocol.

Nowadays, I find that is common for the guy in the next stall to be talking on his cell. However, you will not hear me on a cell as I believe there are moments when silence is golden.

from now on, I close my eyes and hold very still.....

On the phone in the 'crapper'...what progress we've made as a species! And as for being the guy in the next stall, there's nothing like listening to some joker saying the same thing out of both ends of his torso...

On the subject of urinal ettiquette...I was once on a subway in Manhattan when, amongst all the urban clatter, I could suddenly hear Nature's Call. We were just coming up to the platform at Grand Central Station, and I jumped off the train and ran up the staircases to the giant cavernous room made famous in so many moving pictures. I asked at the information desk and was directed to a facility one floor back down underground, reached by a small corridor at the southeast corner of the massive building. As I walked into the art-deco masterpiece of a Men's Room, I could see the place was quite crowded...I made my way to the only free urinal and felt much better almost immediately, whereupon I became engrossed in a study of early twentieth century tile-grouting technique. Gradually, I became aware that many of the 'gents' standing in formation were not only not tending to their own business, they were thoroughly examining that of their fellow patrons. After hurrying out, I vowed that no matter how bad I had to 'go' in the future, I would not step into that particular room again...

Obviously, Senator Craig didn't know about this 'Big Apple' feature, or he would not have wasted his time and career on a stopover in Minnesota.

In Japan (1983) there was a large men's room (perhaps part of the subway, I forget) that didn't have the proper line-of-sight obstructions from the outside - ie: you could walk by and see all the guys standing there doing their best imitation of fire fighters.

The women's room was the next door down the corridor and it was comical to stand there and watch the ladies walk by..... 94.56% of them could simply NOT resist the impulse to take a quick peek and then turn their eyes away in embarrassment. It was quite the scene, and obviously some urinal engineer's intentional design.

When I was a kid in France, the public urinals were right in the street with just a flimsy wall to stand behind which began at knee height, leaving one's 'stance' and footwear for all to see. Pretty hilarious stuff when you're nine years old.

Oh, BTW (brandish the wiener?), a correction: the public toilet I mentioned was located at the SOUTHWEST corner of Grand Central, not the southeast. I haven't been there in years, so I couldn't vouch for it in these post-Giuliani days...but I certainly didn't want mistakenly to send some visiting powerful elected official on a wild goose chase...