It's Still a More Respectable Career Choice than "Congressman"

According to a front page article in today's New York Times, the era of the washroom attendant is nearing its end.  In an unrelated story, Windows 95 has been described as "a bit buggy."

Seriously, though, it's about bloody time.  I'm not exactly sure--and the article doesn't say--when the era of washroom attendants began.  Probably during the more sybaritic days of the Roman Empire; somebody had to clean up after Caligula.  But this is the twenty-first century!  We've long since passed the time when people in otherwise good health needed "attending" in a bathroom.

On those rare occasions when I do encounter a washroom attendant, I feel nothing so much as acute unease.  Who is this guy?  Is he going to be listening?  Am I actually supposed to give someone a tip for handing me a paper towel?

Thankfully, I don't get "stage fright," as some people do--and for those poor souls, an attended bathroom must be a special kind of Hell--but I am instantly flooded with feelings of middle-class guilt--feelings unmitigated by the fact that I am likely in a high-end establishment and have just eaten a meal that may have cost about as much as this poor fellow's entire nightly wages.  While I myself can enjoy the occasional visit to the "high life," this man spends every night exposed to the digestive endgames of the one percent.  So I feel guilt, which makes me wish the attendant weren't there--which makes me feel guilty for wishing the attendant weren't there!  After all, I fully support and celebrate the working man (and woman): Anyone willing to do a job, however distasteful--hell, especially distasteful--deserves some respect.

And herein lies my discomfort: What will become of the dwindling numbers of washroom attendants when this profession ultimately goes the way of mastodon wrangler and newspaper reporter?  Because, let's face it, a person who goes into the bathroom-monitoring industry probably didn't start out with a whole lot of career options: "Well, Mike, you've narrowed your choices down to molecular biology at Tufts or handing out towels to people who have just defecated.  What do you think?"

(All right, all right.  In fairness, the Yale Washroom Attendant program did provide solid career training as well as a rich grounding in the liberal arts until it was discontinued in 1972.)

I suppose a place exists for the bathroom attendant, particularly at large and loud clubs--where the job calls not so much for a connoisseur's knowledge of soaps and colognes as for the ability to prevent people from doing drugs or having sex in blacklit stalls.  Still, I will not miss those moments--however rare--when I come upon a tuxedoed gentleman waiting to hand me a washcloth or a toothpick or--a specialty of one Manhattan restroom attendant--a handful of Reese's Pieces.  Sure, after I drop a waffle, I crave peanut butter as much as the next guy.  But I am a big boy now: I can get my post-poop candy myself.

Blinded 'gainst the Right

Dateline: Ironyville.

Turns out social psychologists--whose job it is to illuminate all the subtle biases infecting the body politic and blinding us to the difficulties faced by those not like ourselves--are infected by bias and blinded to the difficulties faced by those not like themselves. At least, that's what University of Virginia social psychologist Jonathan Haidt says. He has found that a statistically impossible number of social psychologists (something like 536%) identify themselves as liberals. This, in turn, makes it difficult for self-identified conservatives to break in to the social psychology field. But who cares what they think, anyway?

The problem here is that liberal bias lead researchers to faulty conclusions. Let's say a liberal social psychologist examines the virtually non-existent Latino membership in the Ku Klux Klan. He (and it's always "he" because, let's face it, women aren't capable of the academic rigor demanded by the social sciences) may assume a racist explanation. In fact, once you recall that Klan meetings are always held on Tuesday evenings, a simple non-discriminatory explanation for Latino non-participation presents itself: Latinos probably just prefer to spend their Tuesday evenings drinking tequila and committing welfare fraud. QED.

We see liberal bias in the recent mini-uproar over the huge gender imbalance among Wikipedia contributors. Men make up over 85% of the contributing populace. But where a liberal may see discrimination, a cooler head may see an alternative explanation. Remember, that Wikipedia is "open source": Any yutz with a keyboard and an internet connection can pontificate on any topic. Maybe women are just less inclined than men to dilate for15 single-spaced pages on "Lord of the Rings" (which, by the way, only discusses the novel) or 23 pages on "Star Wars" (just the media franchise). When the entry on shoe designer Christian Louoboutin takes up as many pages (four) as the entry on "tribbles," we suspect the reason is less gender discrimination than admirable restraint on the part of female contributors. Maybe a disturbing proportion of men just have way too much time on their hands.

So we ask all members of Solipsist Nation--a decidedly left-leaning bunch--to analyze your own biases. Maybe there is more than one way to look at the world. Then again, that is a fairly liberal attitude, so we may be wrong about it.

Solipsistography
"Define Gender Gap? Look Up Wikipedia's Contributor List"
"Social Scientist Sees Bias Within"