MOVE YOUR PILLOW!

Today I'm showing the students pictures of the Titanic.

There's a reason for it; I'm not just trying to torture them and make them feel like they're on a sinking ship.  Although... the metaphor really is ripe for the taking.

We are examining the Titanic because we are about the read the nonfiction selection from Ballard's Exploring the Titanic.  

I seem to have lost my Powerpoint, so I search the Internet for some appropriate ones I can use in the class.  I come across several but choose two.   Much of the same information is in both, and there are a few cross-over pictures.

One picture appears that I haven't seen before, and I cannot believe what I'm seeing.  All these set-up, promotional photographs, and nobody but me sees this?  It strikes me as so horrifying that I not only point it out to my students in each of my classes, but I drag two other teachers into the room during the day to show them, as well.

The picture shows the inside of a steerage cabin.  About the size of a closet, steerage, or third class accommodations, consisted of metal bunks with mattresses slapped onto the frames.  The berths have sinks.  This I know. And then ... I see it.

There's a urinal, or what appears to be a urinal, hanging off the wall in one of the steerage cabins.  Okay, okay, I get it.  I am surprised to see that steerage isn't sharing potty facilities with several cabins.  But that's not the part that makes me shake my head.

(Kind of like this)

It is this:  Set up for this great pre-sail, promotional photo shoot, I notice that the bunk that abuts the urinal has a pillow.  On the bed.  Next to the toilet.  Where your head and ass would be going.  or, presumably if you're sharing a room, where your head and the urinal splash-over would be going.

Who puts a pillow right in a wet zone?  What if the boat sways, your buddy tips on his own, or the stream of urine splurts beyond the porcelain borders?  What can it all mean?

It means whoever has that bunk is getting wet.

Of course, if you're sea-sick, then the pillow's location means all you have to do is gently turn your head, and that lost lunch will be flushed away.  It means with some really good aim, you can stay in bed and pee into the basin all at the same time, with practice, of course.

All right, I get it. Even after 100+ years, it may still be too soon to belittle the Titanic.  But get real.  Putting a urinal inches from some poor sap's unsuspecting face is kind of funny, in a gross and tasteless way.

This, naturally, explains why I do think it's so funny.  I'm gross and tasteless.  But if you think the peepee-pillow is the worst I've got, come back next week.  That's when I hypothetically kill off most of my students and only let a small few from each class into the lifeboats...