Etiquette please ......

Ha.. Etiquette for everything and most importantly, of the rest room in common places.

During end of last week and the beginning of this week, there were few emails sent from some RESPONSIBLE female colleagues in our floor at my work place.

The first one spoke about the basic etiquette to be followed and pleading the so called, high paid PROFESSIONALS to help maintain hygiene in the toilets. The event that triggered this event was that some unlucky soul had to finish an urgent nature’s call and finally found that the flush not working. I was one of the lucky few who were not destined to face it. SOS :)

After the house keeping guy came to the rescue, we could breathe again. And on Monday again, there were few reminders of healthy habits and requests, a mail on indirect finger pointing and another mail on standing up for self-esteem to say ‘Do not point finger at me. I am as shocked as you are when I witnessed the scene in the rest room’.
All this made me write about the rest rooms we come across in common places like the malls, movie houses, bus & rail stations, etc.

When I used to work in Chennai, me & my roomies happened to go to a very small theater (near Thiruvanmayur bus stop) to catch a much talked about movie "Engal Anna". I could really kill the person who recommended this movie to us, but wasn’t able toL. That being a small talkie, the crowd that normally throngs the place is of the lower middle class or lower class economic crowd. We were very skeptical about going to the loo during the intermission. But we went anyways and were really taken aback. Yeah, you guessed it right. It had one of the most clean and well maintained public conveniences I’ve ever been to. This made me change my perception of judging a place by it size and crowd.

I can go on describing about the numerous public wash rooms we encounter. But I wanted to write about the unpleasant experience I had in hi-fi shopping malls in Bengaluru.
As everyone know, Bengaluru malls give u snap shot view of how a westernized world looks like, of course until you take a peep into the women’s wash room there. The girls waiting to relieve themselves look so pretty with their cute clothes and make-up that it makes people like me to feel totally out of place in a beauty pageant dressing room.

Then you get your turn to use one of the rooms and all the fairy tale images of the models outside and who just left that room crashes with a loud thud as I drop the toilet seat (of course after draping my hands with almost a whole roll of toilet paper). I was reminded of the funny quote about marriage that goes as "Those who are out want to get in and those inside want to get out". The quote was so apt at that moment. These washrooms are the most disgusting places you could find in a so-called modern hang outs. I really pity the housekeeping ladies there and pray that they do not get infected with some horrible disease. And I do not want to imagine anything about the male convenience room at all. It no wonder that many shops keep their washrooms under lock & key and don’t let customers use them :)

I sincerely wished that day that I had a digicam handy to click the mess they have left, to run around all those gals who created it and yell out in front of their friends/relatives about how stupid they are behind closed doors and stick the photo on their face. These people need to be trained at gun point.

I spoke about the small theater in Chennai before to show you the contrast between the people of the supposedly higher class and the normal people for whom going for a movie once a month itself is a luxury. I am a person who usually has a soft corner for the working class and this episode makes me move more comfortably with them rather than with the "models" beautifying the malls’ corridors.