The Law that no one talks about

I don't know about you, but I follow this unstated rule while using the Gent's room. I have seen a lot of other guys follow it as well. Its as if we have an unwritten understanding of the "Least distance of distinct urinal" rule. It goes, "You always choose a slot such that you are at a maximum distance from all the people who are currently using the urinals and any new person that comes in can choose a slot which is at a maximum possible distance from everyone else."

So, basically, if you have 3 urinals and all are empty, you choose the one on either end and not the one in the middle so that the person that comes next can choose the one at the other end. Similarly, if there are 5 urinals and 2 people, chances are that they know the rule and are at opposite ends already and you choose the one in the middle. Even if they don't know the rule, there are always legal slots that are optimized for given the situation. However, its a big problem with even number of urinals. That's when you face one of the most difficult philosophical questions of our era - "Do I go next to the guy who is humming softly or the guy who is wiggling a little?". It is a hard one really and there is no "Do I go next to the guy who is humming softly or the guy who is wiggling a little? for Dummies" book that has an easy answer to this. Every time you have to take that call and every time you have to repent your decision. This is what we go through. Seriously, these folks should cut us some slack!

Anyway, a really annoying thing is when you know the rule and some one comes in and starts unzipping right next to you even though there are a lot of legal slots. Its as if time slows down and everything is happening in slow motion. You think you are going on forever, as if you have had 2 liters of water, a coffee, a diet coke, some orange juice and green tea in a span of an hour (you are pair programming basically). The sound of the zipper feels a loud, prolonged, shrill shriek on your ears, physically hurting them. Soon enough, the pain becomes so unbearable that you go numb. You don't feel anything, even the fact that you are done or that you are being billed by the hour. You just stay there paralyzed. Annoying and painful.

And oh, you guessed it right. There is a formula that calculates the discomfort experienced by a person who knows the rule and the next person coming in breaks it. Its "The amount of discomfort caused when the rule is broken is directly proportional to the number of legal slots that were ignored and indirectly proportional to the square of the distance between the given slot and the newly occupied slot". The constant of proportion is called "Yuri's constant", named after the famous, "Yuri Gotta-go-ri". He was very infamous for his strange bladder condition (he had to go once every 15 minutes for 45 seconds while humming softly and wiggling a little) and was inspired by the not so famous Kannada poet B L Lakshman Rao.

Anyway, now you know how to annoy the hell out of someone you don't like and who you know knows the rule. Be warned. I don't mind biting you if you break the rule with me.