Short Film: Male Restroom Etiquette (2006)

Male Restroom Etiquette from Phil Rice on Vimeo.

My babe and I used to meet after work every other week at a Thai greasy spoon located at the edge of a park known locally here in Berlin as "Goat Square" (Zickenplatz). The food there is hardly a culinary delight, but it's cheap and the place has a huge front plate-glass window that offers a great view to the free-standing public toilet house across the way at the edge of the park. The public toilet has since been converted to a Döner stand, so the view is less entertaining than it used to be. Back when we still went to the greasy spoon and the house was still a toilet, it was also a gay cruising spot – but only for in-the-closet German working class husbands and Turkish Men (with a capital M), not out-of-the-closet normalos. The traffic was heavy with mustached men in Wal-Mart-equivalent clothes who looked like your neighbor's father or your local Turkish butcher, the bellies were bigger than the muscles, and it was fascinating to watch the "mating rituals" of the micro-society in action – the furtive eye glances, the reaction to show interest or rejection, the speed in which some went in and out and left and other went in and out and in and out and in and out. We sometimes wondered what the dance was like inside, but we never went in to find out – the greasy spoon had its own toilet for customers.
So, what does the above have to do with this film? Not much really, other than that when I first saw this fun little tutorial regarding men's restroom etiquette, that public John suddenly came to mind again – the restroom etiquette there would surely have been worth a film as well.
But this film, which has been floating around the web for well over six years now, does not tackle the etiquette of public sex in toilets; it sticks to meat and potatoes: How you and I and John Doe should act in that great haven of relief, the Men's Room. Too few men seem to know these seemingly self apparent rules – as evidenced by all the men who deem it necessary to fart Beethoven's Fifth in full when using the urinals – so for the sake of social improvement we thought it time to share this fun, funny and tasteful tutorial with our public. Learn from it – and help prevent bio-hazards and the downfall of civilization as we know it today.
This machinima film was created by Phil "Overman" Rice – aka Zarathustra Studios – using "The Sims 2, Sim City 4, MOHO, and other tools." He is also the narrator of the film which, according to was listed in the 2009 Guinness World Records Gamer's Edition as the most viewed Sims video uploaded to YouTube.