Pee Polite

I was back in the Pudong office last week to conduct some training, and found myself staring at a familiar old friend:

I had to take a picture of it to share with all of you, because I stared at that thing for over a year when I worked at that site, and many times a day at that (I did my most productive work in the bathroom, after all). Looking at it always cheered me up for multiple reasons, mainly because I figured that no one back in the States would ever use an illustration like this to warn people of not peeing too far away from the urinal.

For those of you who don’t read Chinese…well, tough. I’m not going to do any translating here, since I think it’s pretty self explanatory. But I will walk you through some of my thoughts. In the top right pane; do men ever stand THAT far away from the toilet when peeing? Is projectile pee-ing the province of the Chinese man? Whoever drew this thing must have had a great time drawing out the pee droplets dripping from the base of the urinal.

And then on the left hand corner: I guess the victim in all of this is the spiky haired kid who literally jumps back in revulsion after seeing the little leftover puddle from the selfish launcher before him. One question: why is the violator a stick figure, while the victim a humanoid? I’ve always been a proponent of putting a human face on our society’s worst, before we nebulously judge them. That’s what makes me a liberal. This stick figure shit bothers me.

Sadly, we don’t have anything like this in the bathroom of my current office, save for a tepid request for people to conserve on paper towels for the sake of the environment, which people tend to gloss over as they yank sheet after sheet to wipe their small hands with. Perhaps the Chinese only respond to ridiculous stick-figure illustrations in order to absorb a point.