Thursday, November 12, 2009

one shower at a time

so i don't know if i got a little too excited about this, but i'm kind of sick of the more over sexist bullshit i come across in germany and i've decided to call guys out on it.

i go running at least a few times a week during lunch from my office. i've been doing this basically since reed and don't see any point in changing now. i used the shower downstairs after i come back. the only problem? the only shower in the building is in one of the men's bathrooms. after both walking in on a guy peeing and being walked in on, despite knocking (no one answered) and putting up a sign in big red letters, in german, "caution, woman in the shower," i complained about the situation. my suggestion was to make the bathroom co-ed. i saw this as being pretty straight-forward. all they need to do is put up the little person-in-a-dress-sign (which is obviously a woman, because no man would ever wear a dress) next to the little person-in-pants-sign (obviously a man because have you ever known even one single woman who wore, wait, erm, uh yeah) and add a deadbolt that can be locked from the inside. presto! instant co-ed bathroom!

instead, they gave me a key. so i lock the whole bathroom up when i go in, but i have still walked in on guys (because they refuse to respond to knocking). i was going to accept this fucked-up situation, even though it only solved the problem in a really half-assed way for me and i had talked to other females at my building who would also like to use the shower but just don't bother since it's in the men's bathroom.

so, today, when i got shit for leaving the window open and the light on in the bathroom with the shower yesterday (which i didn't, since i didn't go running yesterday), i decided to bring up the topic of co-edifying the shower bathroom again. the asshat i work with who is completely lacking in both common sense and logic started arguing that "well, you could see the point in wanting to keep it a men's bathroom for the men, so both sides have valid arguments." i pointed out that, no, there was absolutely no validity to that argument as our building currently has 2 women's bathrooms, 3 men's bathrooms, and one co-ed bathroom for people with disabilities. and just as many, if not more, women work on that floor of the building than men. so there was actually no basis behind this argument WHAT SO EVER. at which point he suggested that i could just walk the 1000 m down the street to use the shower at the other building owned by our insitute (has both men's and women's showers). but why the fuck should i have to do that when there is a perfectly good, functioning shower in our own goddamned building.

i finally nailed it when i suggested that the insitute just give me 15 euros, with which i could put up a fucking sign and purchase and install a goddamned lock myself! he finally conceded that maybe we could talk to some of the facilities people about it.

but i think it's just because he didn't think that a girl should be installing locks.

1 Comments:

Blogger Jonny said...

you write it so its funny and i wanna chuckle but that sucks pretty bad, sorry

sounds like yr layin the smack down tho, so good job

8:00 AM  

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