So the potty training thing never really ends, does it?

You'd think by my age—and my children's ages—I'd have left potty training in the dirt ages ago and I wouldn't be close enough to senility to be concerned about my supply of Depends yet, but somehow I've found myself having the potty conversation a lot lately. Maybe the early senility part is that I'm usually having it with myself, but I've done so much of that in my lifetime that I don't think much about it.

I think the reason this came up a few weeks ago was that the university finally replaced the toilet paper holders in the ladies room outside my office. I remember when I was a little kid and Mother lectured me on the amount of toilet paper I used; somewhere down the road I decided that must have been a Baptist mantra at some time because my college roommate's mother had used it on her, too. My mom probably did it because we were as dirt poor as the indigents the Baptist missionaries were trying to reach; my roomie's family never seemed to be in those dire straits. But the rule both of us heard was three squares per visit, and I was amazed by the neighbor down the street who would reel off yards of the stuff every time she went.

I was pretty sure the university had the same rule because the paper holders worked so horribly as to make me give up after battling for a few inches of tissue lest I not finish my day's work in a day's time. Ultimately, the top roll seemed to be permanently wedged over the bottom one so that neither one would turn. (And for a while there, the custodians were prohibited from replacing a roll until it was completely gone, which got to be a real challenge late in the day when the custodians had been long gone.)

Then one day I reached for the end of the roll and it whirled out almost completely across the stall as if it had been loosed by a teenager on Halloween. I recovered, gathered it up enough to finish my business, and laughed on my way to the sink.

Where I had another surprise: the new tissue holders had come in tandem with new soap dispensers, too. They weren't what any self-respecting designer would refer to as a matched set, so I have no idea why they both seemed to come together, but I'd long since grown tired of having to close the top section that held the soap pouch every time I bumped the bottom to release a stream of liquid.

I reached over to bump the release, but nothing happened. I had to examine it for a second before I realized that it was automatic, which meant all I had to do was to hold my hand under it briefly to get a lovely little mound of foam on my palm. I continued to paper the stall and jab at the soap dispenser for the rest of the week before I got the hang of using either one of them.

So then I went to New Orleans for a conference in a lovely convention center that had automagic faucets. I think the idea of automagic faucets is wonderful except that (a) they all seem to have different mechanisms to trip them and (b) I can't ever figure out what the right action is to get the one I'm facing started. I'm sure they save water for the places that have them, but I can work up a good level of frustration standing in front of a sink and striking a series of inane poses in search of the right way to hold my hands to get the water to come on.

And in the sinks at our favorite movie theater, the water is often so hot as to worry me that it's going to burn some little kid's hands, although I guess that's dependent on whether the kid can get it started. (I suppose that if kids have the same knack for automagic water faucets that they have for operating other electronic devices, they probably never miss a beat and the water starts for them first time, every time.) But if they can't get the water started or can't hold their hands in it, how healthy is that for the rest of us?

And then we have towel dispensers. I've survived the old cloth roll dispensers and dozens of iterations of the folded brown towels, so I've had some towel dispenser experience. But when I first visited the school where my daughter works a few years ago, I had recently been on an overseas flight and had spent an inordinate amount of time in various facilities that had automagic towel dispensers. You guessed it: every one different, and every one a guessing game about which pantomime to perform to get the towels to appear.

At the convention I attended in New Orleans, the custodial staff on the first day had carefully dispensed from each dispenser in the restrooms a length of toweling that just suited my needs, so all I had to do was tear them off and not worry about how to make the things work. But these were the good old, familiar dispensers like we had back home at school, so I followed what I understand is protocol in Asia and left the dispensers the way I found them.

The idea really makes good sense to me: wash your hands, tear off the length of towel on the dispenser, then use the towel in your hand to dispense enough for the next customer. No wet hands on the dispenser lever, and a towel in hand to dispense for the next user. In fact, I've been known to campaign for a wastebasket near the restroom door so I can open the door with the towel still in my hand and toss the towel on the other side.

So when I got through washing my hands at my daughter's school, I walked over to the sleek, streamlined towel dispenser and started my usual gyrations in front of it: hands held still beneath it, hands still in front of it,  hands waving across the front, down the front, up the sides.... Oh. There on the side. The left and the right might look different because the trim on the right is a release lever. A couple of quick pushes (okay, three or four to find the right spot) and I had plenty of toweling for what I needed.

I had been in an another series of airports before my trip back last weekend, and this time I found yet another kind of towel dispenser. No handy pull tab, no indication of a trip light; instead, just pull gently and voilá—there they are! If it's that easy to get a towel, why did I spend all that time practicing charades?

By now I was beginning to think I must surely be approaching Alzheimer's faster than I thought when I read my niece's blog, wherein she related the story of an associate who habitually lets sneezes fly across the office but then carefully lines the toilet seat with tissue lest she contract someone else's germs. So it isn't just me that has this weird bathroom issue....

But then that brings up the case of the airport toilet with the automatic seat liner dispenser. That's a lovely idea and I appreciate the concern for my personal well-being, but could they please tell me how to make the liner stop circling the seat and just flush the thing? This one was not an automatic flusher or it would surely not have had residual tissue still in the bowl, but I must have dispensed four yards of seat liner before I figured out how to flush it myself.

My daughter isn't any help, either. She's in the process of breaking in a new roommate, which includes not only teaching him to put the leftovers in the Tupperware for storage but also washing his hands after using the potty. I don't know where she gets the idea this can happen—I raised her with two brothers who seem not to understand why the bathroom has a sink, in spite of my efforts to educate them—but she seems determined. She really likes this guy, so she's trying to be gracious about it, but she really does believe washing hands prevents the spread of germs."I've heard all the arguments about how they don't touch anything in there," she acknowledges. "I just don't buy it."

I might; it could explain a lot of why the ladies room downstairs at our house is substantially cleaner between scrubbings than the men's room upstairs. But either he's willing the seat up and down mysteriously or he's touching it with his hands or—ew—his feet, and either way, I'm pretty sure something in there calls for a hand washing. 

I'm going to wish her a lot of luck with that, but it's an argument I don't want to join. I figure if I ever share a house with a person who doesn't want to wash, I'm going to assign bathrooms and stay out of the one that isn't mine. I don't want to hear about it.

Meanwhile, I'm off to another adventure, and I know I'll have to use an unfamiliar potty somewhere. Just give me strength to make the system work!