You know what’s a terrible experience? Sniffles in a public bathroom.

Not the type of sniffles where your nose is so plugged up, you feel like a blast of compressed air wouldn’t even get through ; the type of sniffles where you can be sure that if did not wipe, or sniffle every few seconds, there will be a little drop of snot on the tip of your nose. All day, every few seconds you wipe your nose with a tissue just to keep from getting a puddle on your keyboard, and then you have to go to the bathroom.

You walk into the bathroom and see that at least one of the stalls is occupied and there is a certain olfactory “character” to the air. It smells terrible.

You sidle up to the urinal and start your business when you feel the slight tickle of snot as it trickles down your nasal passage. Since you are an adult now and you don’t want the tell-tale whitish streak up your sleeve, you avoid the sleeve wipe technique. Regardless, you are peeing, so while the sleeve wipe technique may have worked, the sudden lateral movement could not only cause the “white streak on sleeve”, but also an embarrassing “splash mark on pants.” So you do the next best thing, instinctively, you sniffle; an instinctive explosive inhalation of air, through the nose of mouth into the lungs, to avoid expelling nasal mucus. That sudden inhalation is followed by the realization that you just inhaled the aroma your stalled neighbor expelled, and you realize that at the rate you are urinating, there will need to be at least one more sniffle, and you cry a little inside.