Playing Chicken with Automated Toilets

To beat a dead horse, my MA exam process killed me and I decided that afterwards I would need to go recuperate in Chicago for a long long time... two weeks centered around Thanksgiving. My Dad decided that while I was home, it would be a good idea for me to continue the networking and try to find a job.

Sidebar: if you have a paying job that needs doing, you call me.

Anyways, we went to his alma mater, UIC, to a lecture where, of everyone in the audience, I was probably the youngest by about twenty years. Basically, this means that people who I consider to be old could have been in the young set with me. But such people where not there.

But the point: this lecture took place in the student union type building at UIC which forced me to confront with automated bathroom technology. If I had a Stephen Colbert-esque list of people/things that I have on notice, automatic bathroomness would definitely be on it. As you may recall from the incident at the Standard Hotel from "Beer Garden in November & a Prize Fightin' Man," I don't do well here. It wasn't that the toilets at the UIC bathroom refused to acknowledge me, it was more that they felt we were engaged in combat, or at least a mean game of chicken. Not that this is unusual, but really, can't someone do something about that? I mean, fix the censor, decrease the fury of the flush action--something to lower the stakes of peeing in a public restroom. I have faith that it could be done. I never was a fan of chicken.