You’re at a restaurant during the dinner rush. You excuse yourself and stand in line outside of the one-person bathroom. While in line, you make small talk with the guy behind you until its finally your turn. You immediately gag. Most of the surfaces are wet and it looks like a roll of toilet paper had exploded. You’d prefer using a bush but you waited a while so you decide to stay.

On another night, you’d squint your eyes, do your best to aim, and kick the flush lever on your way out, but not tonight! Tonight, you feel pressured to clean up a little. The next guy waiting outside can’t think that you made this nightmare. Its not like you could just tell him “hey man, it was a mess before I got here, I didn’t do this.” I mean you could, but that’s so uncomfortable. So you convince yourself that cleaning up the mess is the easiest option.

This probably happened because of the bystander effect which means that your level of responsibility to respond to a situation will change based on how many other people are around; The less people that are around, the MORE social pressure you will feel to respond; The more people are around, the LESS social pressure you will feel to respond. This explains why our lazy asses barely did any work on group assignments in school.

So back to the bathroom- Why do YOU have to clean it? Its not because the silly “keep toilet clean sign” convinced you to. Its because everybody who used it before you doesn’t hold any responsibility to the mess anymore, and making them clean up after themselves at this point is unrealistic… And by chit-chatting in line with Carl about the restaurant’s best parking spots, you can’t hide behind anonymity anymore. As far as Carl is concerned, nobody else went in that bathroom and it was clean before YOU went in.

So if you want to avoid being put in this position, and not feel pressured to clean up somebody else’s crap, here’s my advice: Next time, don’t talk to other people in bathroom lines. Get on your phone and follow me on Twitter instead :p