Please Consider We Who Come After You

Have I ranted on this before? The guy who be-bops out of the mensroom magnetized to his iPhone, with no awareness or consideration whatsoever that he has left the facility wreaking of his gastric plumage?

It's possibly a delicate subject, I admit, but really, there are even limits to what us rugged he-guys will endure from one another.

Call our mothers a farm animal… hint that we're less than granite… question our ability to woo a mate or produce mentally stable offspring… we handle all that – though we might not relish the battle, in secret. But to assume that others enjoy being flash-swamped by your shotgun butt-whiff is taking machismo too far.

I don't wish to share your colon's chemical handiwork on those seven fish tacos you scarfed down at lunch, thank you kindly.

We tried to be nice about it. We placed a can of air freshener, and hung a demure sign in the mens: "Please consider who uses the room next."

That apparently wasn't direct enough. So we placed a larger sign, which had drawn an arrow, pointing to the air freshener. "Please use this after flushing."

Well even that wasn't sufficiently tow-headed to get the message across. Then there came the jumbo can – impossible to miss, especially placed centrally upon the toilet tank behind the bowl – with a sign that made the request abundantly clear to anyone who can decypher basic words: "Spray room after you flush. No one wants to smell you."

So today I approach the mens, in time to meet iPhone Commander coming the other way – he nearly runs into me. I enter the facility, and immediately think a nearby paint factory has exploded. I back-track out in expeditious fashion.

There sits the largest available retail family-jumbo-deluxe can of Mountain Berry Glade – untouched!

A sign as big as a movie poster, reads down to 3rd Grade level: "PLEEZ USE SPRAY AFTER YOU DO A BIG CACA! NOBODY LIKES SMELLING YOUR BIG CACA!"

"Smell big caca?" The room is like iPhone Dude has stashed a garbage bag full of week-old dead gophers in there.

And he's plunking more money into the breakroom vending machines, for select junky snacks to diversify his next exertion's savory nuance.

Am I unkind? Does someone really need to confront this self-distracted walking contaminant, about the fact that his bowel movements are not grunted out in a galactic vacuum, that other living things must endure his rancid rectal greenhouse effect? Can anyone this obsessed with technology be so disconnected from his own biology?

Does he just not smell it himself anymore? Is he so used to his own inner rot that it no longer registers on his olfactory meter? Even a beer-and-chili addicted trucker knows to exit a bathroom with a warning along the lines of "don't go in there for a few minutes."

Or are there people who actually derive personal satisfaction out of being such a – literal – huge asshole?

What the hell must his home bathroom smell like? How many patient girlfriends has this human debris factory melted like they'd fallen into a vat of nuclear solvent?

Maybe the next sign would be better, were it poetic, and uncaring whether its readers were educated or not. "Please consider we who come after you, or we'll come after you."