Humiliation by design

Schadenfreude is a word that doesn’t get used often enough. It’s a German word meaning “taking pleasure in other people’s discomfort or pain”. Note, it’s not “sadism” which is the pleasure you get from inflicting pain on others. You can easily tell the difference. Schadenfreude is what you feel when you watch “The Biggest Loser”; the sensation of “rather you than me”. Sadism is why the people that created “The Bachelor” are inflicting it on you.

In our daily lives, we suffer little humiliations that bring pleasure to others. Are they schadenfreude or sadism? Your call.

Toilets with walls just over a metre high. You know the ones? The wall starts about 50cm from the ground and ends at 150cm – about right for a normal 12 year old to be able to see over the top of. Convenient if you want to chat amiably to other ease-takers but uncomfortable if pooing in public is not something you enjoy.  Someone designed those. Was is just a cost-saving to use less material or was the humiliation deliberate? My call is schadenfreude: the pleasure you feel watching sh*t happening to other people.

Security windows. You go to Emergency and you’re feeling well below standard – or you wouldn’t be there. You go to see the nurse, so that they can assess how urgent you’re not, and you have to speak through the perspex window. They used to put holes in them about mouth height to allow the ingress and egress of sound but not anymore; there’s a letter box sized opening at the bottom and that’s it. And everyone, other than people with a live-in contract at a chocolate factory and chronic liver disease, has to bend to get their mouths near the window. If you don’t the nurse, who can lip read but won’t, will ask you the same questions three times – which, of course, you’ve got the patience to put up with, feeling as hale as you do. So, strike a pose! Bent over sideways to talk, doubled over front-ways in pain, leaking blood from under the bandages and showing your backside to the world - clad in the house-cleaning tracksuit pants that were the only thing you could grab as you walked out. My call? Sadism. I think the nurses hate their jobs and want to take it out on the patients. It’s the same reason that waiting room chairs are as comfortable as they aren’t.

Airplane toilets. For men over 5’2”, this one’s for you. At risk of being crude, men pee standing up. That’s our divine right and it’s not negotiable. To make that work you need a good firm footing a reasonable distance from the porcelain. Then you go on a plane. It would be fine if the loo was up against an internal wall but it’s not, it’s shoved into the corner against the sloping fuselage. The curvature  of the wallroof means that you have to plant your feet well back and lean it at the hips to have any hope of hitting the target. So there you are, with your best parts forward, your feet well back, unable to see what you’re aiming at, with weapon in one hand and the other trying to find something to brace yourself against. At this point, a little light in the cockpit alerts the pilot to fake some turbulence and you sign your name across the wall in your best cursive writing. The worry that follows is that the amount of paper you’ve had to use cleaning it up won’t flush away. Despite the humiliation, I’m calling schadenfreude on this one. If it was sadism, the door wouldn’t lock as well as it does.

Waste transfer stations. The old tip (landfill site) was great; big pile of garbage and plenty of room to get your trailer in to unload. Now the general public can’t be trusted with access to putrefying detritus and we have to use the waste transfer station. All very hygienic with concrete driveway and large bin into which you can dump your refuse. Fine - provided you can back a trailer up a cobbled laneway, in an Italian hilltop town, in the rain, on the day of the annual harvest festival. And no-one can back a trailer. They’re designed that way.  Deep in the heart of the engineering is a little random movement generator which will thwart you every time. But you try. You remind yourself of the rules:

 “OK, think about this before we start:  steering wheel down left to get the thing to go left, steering wheel down right to make it go right. Unless it’s already too far left in which case it will keep going left. Unless you’re on a slope in which case it will go right if the angle subtended by a line orthogonal to the axle with an imaginary line drawn through the Pole Star is less than 45 degrees, otherwise it will go left. Or unless you’re tired in which case it’s just as likely to refuse to go anywhere other than straight up.”

 This is all complicated by the magnet built in just behind the left brake light which drags the trailer inexorably towards neighbouring vehicles.

The humiliation is completed by a “helpful” passer-by or council worker standing behind you giving hand signals for left rudder, right rudder, come closer, slower, faster and that weird one they do with a clenched fist held over a raised finger moving in a circular motion which I can never really fathom but I think is a reflection on my masculinity.

Waste transfer stations are engineered sadism, pure and simple. I’ll accept debate on the other ones but I’m not entertaining any other views on this last point.