midlifejourney.com

Years ago, an Irish woman and I were out shopping. Suddenly she stopped me and said, “I must go spend a penny.” Puzzled, I asked her to explain. She leaned over and whispered, “I have to go to the bathroom,” and off she went to find the nearest rest room.

It turns out that in her home town back in Ireland, anytime you visited a public rest room you had to “spend a penny” - i.e. put money in the door lock of the stall in order to use the facility. Suddenly I remembered. When I was a kid, it was always a pain in the neck to use a public restroom. They had these door locks that required you to put in a dime in order to open the stall door. The reason was to pay for the “electric seat cleaning gizmo” that was installed on each toilet. After each use, the toilet seat retracted into this hole in the wall that was lined with bright blue neon lights. The idea was that the electricity, or heat, or light… whatever it was, would “sanitize” the seat for the next person. The dime in the door was to help defray the costs I guess.

The dilemma for a kid… do you pay the dime to get into a stall? Do you hold the door for the next person, so they don’t have to pay the dime? Do you wait and wait for the one free stall to open up so you wouldn’t have to pay at all? And if you used the free stall that didn’t have the electric blue seat, were you taking a big chance of catching some horrible disease???? These were major ethical dilemmas.

Anyone else have these issues?