RANT: Spitting in urinals

My apologies to my female readers. You most likely have never witnessed the “beauty” of perfectly executed urinal expectorating, and so the topic of this rant may not be of particular interest. For those who are not familiar with the phenomenon, let me elaborate.

I’m in the men’s room, doing my thing. A man walks up to the urinal next to me, snorts and snuffles, and then hocks a big one. He then starts to relieve himself, and in mid-stream, leans over and lets fly another glob. He then finishes up, and spits again while zipping his fly. Finally he flushes and adds a fourth shot, for good measure, while the water is still running.

I witness such displays (of masculinity?) on a fairly regular basis, and every time, I’m perplexed. What is the attraction of spitting in a urinal? Does this same man spit outside on the sidewalk every chance he gets? Is it a game, or does he have a cold?

Are any of my readers habitual urinal spitters? Can you possibly enlighten me as to the appeal?

– danBhentschel

4 thoughts on “RANT: Spitting in urinals”

  1. Was this at Allworx? I have a hypothesis about bathroom use at Allworx, I’ll share if it was.

    As to the specific incident, my presumption would be that the guy needed to spit anyway, and then the urinal provided a convenient receptacle.Read more …

  2. So the Allworx thing… At Xerox, there were two bathrooms per floor, and the stairs were right next to the bathrooms — meaning that you had very easy access to four different bathrooms from anywhere in the building.Read more …

  3. Alright, well I had to do the math anyway. Let’s consider a bathroom serving a population of 50 people, that is empty half the time. We already have p_empty = (1-p)^P, so p_empty = 0.5 and P = 50, Wolfram Alpha tells me that p =~ 0.013.Read more …

Leave a Reply to James Sweet on Facebook Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.