From time to time, when my wife is using the master
bathroom, I have to use the kids’ bathroom. As the bathroom is primarily used
by two teenage boys, it can be a bit…well…unkempt, to put it nicely. I won’t
get into much of the specifics, because I want to keep this high-brow, but
there is one phenomenon I would like to address today—the never-emptied
bathroom garbage.
The wastebasket in this bathroom is kept in the cabinet under the sink, so it
is not something you see upon first entering the room. Indeed, unless you have
occasion to throw something out in there, you would never even look for it. The
truth, though, is that if you wash your hands after you do your business (which
you should always do, young man!) then you would have to look for it, because
this particular bathroom utilizes paper towels rather than cotton ones. (If you’re
wondering, our towel rack fell off the wall years ago and I’ve not been
ambitious enough to install a new one, but that’s a story for another day.)
Once you have washed and dried your hands and it is time to throw away your
used paper towel, your next move would be to open up the cabinet under the sink
and simply throw your debris into the garbage. Sounds simple, I know, but upon
opening that cabinet you will be greeted with a wastebasket that looks kind of
like a snow cone at first glance. The garbage, full to 150-percent of capacity,
collects in an almost spherical shape that seems to defy the laws of physics. Faced
with this mind-bending phenomenon, two questions occur to you: 1) Should I
attempt to add my garbage to this unstable heap of refuse; and 2) Why doesn’t someone
simply dump this garbage?
The answer to the first question is easy. If you are anyone other than my two teenage sons—no, you would not attempt to add your garbage to the pile, but rather bring it out of the bathroom and find a different wastebasket. But if you are one of my boys, the answer to that question is “Yes” and that gets to the heart of the second question.
Clearly my kids are playing a long-range game of “garbage chicken” and they both refuse to blink first. Why would either of them bother to spend the two minutes it would take to simply take the garbage can out of the bathroom and dump it, when they can instead add yet another paper towel or bathroom cup to their Jenga-like tower of rubbish? Perhaps they think that if they were the ones to dump the garbage it would be admitting some sort of defeat.
When I first came across this phenomenon a few months back, I decided not to dump the garbage myself, not because I wanted to enter into their game of garbage chicken, but because I thought it would be an interesting social experiment to see how long it would take before one of them finally took action. Since they are the ones who use that bathroom 98-percent of the time, it seemed reasonable that one of them would eventually address the situation head on. Well, it seemed reasonable in theory, but a week later I checked back underneath the sink and found a pile that looked similar to one of the trash heaps in WALL-E. Unable to stand it any longer, I broke down and had my younger son (lucky him, he was the one awake at the time) finally dump the garbage.
Satisfied that the game of garbage chicken was finally disbanded, I went back to my room, blew my nose in victory and threw out my tissue in my bedside wastebasket…which was completely full, forcing me to squash down my garbage with every ounce of strength I could muster so my tissue would somehow fit in. Exhausted, I sat down on my bed and wondered to myself, “Why are my kids so dang lazy?”
