Train of Thought

I wonder about the strangest things sometimes.

Example: I was in the restroom at work the other day and I noticed there are three stalls, two urinals, and four sinks. What happens if everyone finishes at the same time? Is there a specific etiquette for this? My coworker suggested it becomes a game of musical chairs (first come first serve), or possibly the guys who were in the stalls have first dibs (let’s face it, they need to wash their hands more).

But this also made me wonder, how do they calculate these things? Is there somebody somewhere whose job it is to figure out the optimum sink-to-stall ratio? Must be a tough job, since you have to account for the overly meticulous guy who’s going to wash his hands longer than anybody else, but you also have to factor for those filthy fellows who don’t wash at all. And then there’s the guys who dash in specifically to wash their hands but don’t need to use the bathroom at all. Do they throw off the calculations?

Clearly this is a job whose time has come, since at school there are two sinks for about 20 “rest stops”, if you will. But then I expect nothing else from my beloved university, where “We Kill Efficiency Whenever It Raises Its Head” was just edged out as a school motto by “You May Drive Here, But You Can’t Park Here”.

And speaking of driving, I will never understand traffic patterns as long as I live. It used to be that back roads were supposed to be the way around traffic on the highways. I moved recently and subsequently have had to change my commute (which is now technically longer) away from back roads to a highway, one of the most popular in the region in fact. Most days my commute time has been the same, and some days it’s even shorter. This makes no sense to me. The only exception has been the first week of school, when apparently everybody went to work and/or drove their kids, before they all let out their metaphorical guts and said, “ah, the heck with it” and went back to their normal routine.

I’m still trying to develop a new routine. Bad enough I had to move to a new house in a new neighborhood, AND I’m back in classes, but My Not So Humble Wife started a new job as a school teacher. Yes, she’s a first year teacher, which from objective observation seems to me to be akin to Purgatory: indistinguishable from Hell except insofar as it will someday end. She’s also in class one night a week, a class composed almost entirely off first year teachers, who all have to be up early enough to wake the rooster on the way out the door. Her professor is aware of this, so naturally he lets them go early every week. Just kidding! She goes to the same school I do, “Where Killing Your Dreams Is Tradition”, and he keeps them right up to the last minute and sometimes after every week. What a swell guy. I need to put him on my Christmas card list.

Speaking of Christmas, I may (finally) be able to put up outside Christmas lights this year. I know that doesn’t sound like a big deal, but for the better part of the last decade I’ve lived in a house with no outside outlets. How does that happen? I grew up putting on the biggest and gaudiest – excuse me, most tasteful light display possible every year, and I’ve looked forward to continuing that tradition in my own home. It saddens me that I have an inflatable snow globe still sitting in the box in my attic, waiting to greet the people of the world. I’m starting to wonder if I’ll ever get to use it.

But like I said, I wonder about the strangest things sometimes.