Okay, clearly I am on a roll regarding bathroom, toilet and poop posts. I shall continue the trend.
As I was in the St. Louis-Lambert Airport waiting to fly home from visiting my Grandma, I noticed that all of the restrooms were labeled as Tornado Shelters. (You may know that about two years ago a tornado hit the airport, blasting out a bunch of the windows. It was awful, though no one was killed. Missouri is in Tornado Alley.)
Now, this makes sense, I will admit. There are no windows in the bathrooms, there is usually plenty of space, and if you are trapped there a long time, it would be handy to have toilets.
On the other hand, ew. Granted, the restrooms at the airport were very clean and nice, but that doesn't mean I want to spend hours there. Plus, during a tornado, would the idea of separate men's and women's restrooms be so ingrained into the public conscious that folks would scramble to get to the appropriate bathroom? Maybe not. Maybe the fear erases all of that. I mean, you wouldn't want to split families up.
It's something to think about.
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On a somewhat related note, I shall share a tornado story. While I was in grad school at the University of Missouri-Columbia, tornado sirens went off frequently, due to the aforementioned Tornado Alley.
One semester I was in a cataloguing class taught by this great, but very hardcore, former-Soviet Union professor. I didn't know much about her background, but I assume you become pretty tough if you grew up and lived in the Soviet Union. (Plus, librarians have very liberal ideas -- not a good match for the Soviet Union.)
So one day we are in class, in a classroom that has one wall with floor-to-ceiling windows. The tornado siren goes off, and all of us start scrambling to get into the hall. This professor asks us where we think we're going. We reply that the tornado siren is going off. "So?" she replies. Well, we explain, there is an entire wall of windows. She tells us that if we feel we really need to leave, we can, but she is going to continue teaching, and won't repeat the information. We will be reliant on our textbooks for that portion. Almost everyone stayed.
Looking back, we really should have left for a safer area. But if one is in a dangerous situation with a really tough person who doesn't appear to be bothered in the least, one tends to look at this person in awe and follow their example.
Granted, this could be why people do horrible things: like Nazis who just did whatever their superiors told them, even if it was monstrous.
But still, this professor was awesome.
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