The Unspoken Rule of the Women's Restroom

Note: This blog will most likely be understood by women, as men have a much easier time in public bathrooms than we do.

You enter the restroom and cautiously give a gentle push on one of many stall doors. It budges. You feel it is safe to swing the door wide open, only to pull back in disgust. The toilet is either clogged, covered in toilet paper, or just plain disgusting. You obviously can't use that stall. So you move to the next. It's possible that a repeat of the above situation occurs or you find the selected stall occupied and are forced to search elsewhere. Finally you find an empty, fairly clean stall to use.

I believe there is an unspoken rule where you must go in at least one stall before actually settling on one. At least, it happens to me constantly. And I doubt I am the only woman who has this problem.

Another thing I just don't understand about public bathrooms is the toilet paper. Whose idea was it to invent tissue thin toilet paper that disintegrates the second you touch it? Someone must be getting a huge laugh over it! I mean, what good is toilet paper that just shreds in your hand when you try to pull it off the roll? I always am forced to jam my hand up into the toilet paper dispenser and carefully slide the roll around until a sufficient amount of paper is dangling from the spool. Then, and only then, am I free to victorioulsy detach the 3-4 squares of TP I have freed from the roll. By the way, this process is simply too involved for the paltry reward. Is it really that expensive to use 2-ply toilet paper? I know that this tissue supplied in most public restrooms is supposedly better at breaking down (however, despite the fact that it falls apart in my hand, I almost always find 1-3 clogged toilets in the restroom...), but even a thicker 1-ply would be nice.

Hopefully, things will change. I look forward to the day when I enter the bathroom at Barnes & Noble and am greeted with soft to the touch, quilted toilet paper, instead of the sheer, paper substance I currently find.