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I had to use a public bathroom in a store which involved sitting on a toilet. I don’t usually care to do it, but it was an emergency. That wasn’t a problem.

Dirty floor with discarded toilet paper fragments and soaked paper towels. Eh. Okay. I can deal with that.

But having to remove the most fragile and thinnest toilet paper I have ever seen in my life...that was irritating as all get out.

Trying to unroll it from the two foot diameter roll that obviously had some kind of friction inducing bearing inside of it was impossible.

You had to stick your hand inside the dispenser and manually turn the roll about two inches at at time (because it would only allow only the minutest insertion of anything into it, never mind your fingers held upside down at a level six inches below the level of the top of your seat (causing you to bend over double as your trousers dip in and out of the wet, disgusting goo on the floor) tear off the minuscule piece, turn another fraction of a turn, get another piece, repeat over and over until you have a mound of shredded...something...in your hand, then you try to use the mound of shredded pulp. (The mound in my hand resembled what I have seen a cat do to a toilet paper roll)

And the “tissue” literally evaporates and disappears. Just amazing.

Nobody else was in the bathroom, so I cracked the door and took a peek at the paper towel dispenser, but to my dismay, only saw one single electric hand dryer. And not “The Blade” or even a standard lousy one. It was the kind that is even worse than the lousy kind that don’t work. The kind where you push the button, and a slight breath of damply warm air comes out that wouldn’t even dislodge that pile of shredded tissue in your hand.

So that’s out.

I came to the conclusion it might be better just to completely use your hand, then wash it, which is basically what you end up doing anyway, except now you have atomized particles of some kind of tissue paper byproduct that has reacted to air in an attempt to decompose to nothingness faster than you can use it.

Fascinating. This has to be what it is like in parts of the world where they don’t even have leaves from plants to use, like the Middle East. And this is America.

So, you proceed. After completely desecrating your hand with filth (which after multiple failed attempts where the “tissue” seemed to evaporate in the very air as you carried it to your backside to wipe) you gloomily accept there is no easy way out of this. After all, you wouldn’t even have come into this bathroom if your bowels hadn’t been gurgling and turning to liquid as it sent out premonitory warning spasms like Krakatoa leading up to 1883.

And here you are.

Like a pilot in a desperate situation whose crippled plane is hurtling towards its doom who wonders how his life led him to that specific moment of terrible truth in the moments before inescapable disaster will befall him, I had to wonder if I had done something differently, could I have avoided this.

Perhaps, not have eaten Mexican food for lunch.

Or driven directly home instead of trying to stop and run an errand.

Or checking the physical characteristics of the bathroom beforehand. (This is dismissed out of hand, because you were in the final extremity. Like the hapless pilot, the ground was hurtling towards your stricken plane and you had to try something...anything, and this bathroom appeared like an oasis in a desert.)

No matter. The deed is done. That oasis you thought was a bathroom was simply a mirage.

Then, to compound the disgusting humiliation of the situation, the soap dispenser is empty, and the water stream, in any case, is cold and feeble. An 85 year-old guy with a bad prostate could deliver more volume in a shorter amount of time.

In revulsion, you persistently try your best, and when you hold your hands under the weak, ice cold stream, you see where fate has led you. With discouraged foreboding, you press the button on the hand dryer, put your hands under it, and conclude that Romeo would dry his hands faster by holding them in front of Juliet’s mouth (after she has taken the potion that makes her seem dead) as he checked to see if she yet lived.

You wipe your sopping, soiled hands on your trousers, and exit the door to escape this nightmare with haste, but not before muttering to the man shouldering by you as he rushes in: “I wouldn’t go in there if I were you.”