Fully coffee-fied and now moving fast... we leave Starbucks in NYC's Civic Center for the next leg of our hike; crossing the Brooklyn Bridge. Rant of the week: unisex bathrooms suck. This Starbucks, and probably many others (I am not a Starbucks fan, so would not know), has a ‘uni-sex’ bathroom. Two, actually. The result is that men now stand in line for 20 minutes just to take a … well, what would normally be a quick pee. I would really like to see us go back to a world with separate-but-equal bathrooms, where the men's room contained a urinal. Okay – give the women 3 or 4 rest-rooms for our 2. But having to stand on line for 20 minutes while women clog the pipeline, so to speak, while doing whatever the hell it is that women do for 5 minutes when in a bathroom is really annoying. Further, I can’t believe that this unisex idea is a great deal for women either. Given the typical sorry state of the men’s bathroom (if there is no urinal most guys are too damned lazy to lift the lid, and our directional control is not all it is cracked up to be…), what woman would want to then use that toilet whose seat is dripping with urine? This is, after all, a ‘free’ bathroom in lower Manhattan: 10% of the guys waiting on line to use the bathroom are probably HIV+. I wish Starbucks supplied spray bottles with industrial-strength Clorox so that we could sterilize the facilities before using them. And while I’m on a misogynistic roll: how about separate checkout lines for men and women in the supermarket? Most small African nations could negotiate a loan from the World Bank in less time than it takes the average women to search thro her purse for the exact change to pay for the groceries. Just hand the check-out person $40, please!

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