Have you ever wanted to rub shoulders with two other men in a bizarre urination sandwich?

Me neither.

But that’s what happened in this upsetting urinal corner where the troughs had been placed so absurdly close together, that you all get to pee together like three sardines in a can. Don’t let the wide-angle perspective mislead you, because in reality, this area was about the size of a small elevator.

I was alone, the room was empty, and all troughs were vacant when I chose the middle urinal, and everything was going according to plan— for about 5 seconds.

But then, all of a sudden, with a bustling flourish, two other men entered the tiny space and flanked me on both sides. It became so cramped that each of my arms and shoulders were suddenly touching the arms and shoulders of the two other men.

We were all physically touching each other, and I was being unexpectedly jostled by the mere action of them trying to undo their files - at which point, my urination stream stopped flowing abruptly, never to return.

I was trying to figure out why this felt so odd, and it occurred to me that in America, our personal space boundaries are different. Upon seeing the absurdly small space and the proximity of the urinals, any two American men would have unquestionably waited. Rather than strong-arm their way to a urinal in a comically small space and allow their arm hair to touch the arm hair of another man while he's holding his penis and peeing... they would have politely held back and waited. I have no doubt about this.

Picture the scene from countless movies where two big burly bouncer dudes flank and lock arms with the main character saying, "Sir, we've been told to escort you out of here," and then they drag him forcefully out of the club. Well, as we all stood there at the urinals, that's the scene I felt like I was in. These guys all but had their arms threaded through mine.

For a white guy, I have abnormally long arm hair. Although mine is fluffy, blonde and shiny, as opposed to coarse and black like theirs, I always felt like a lot of these Moroccan men were kindred spirits. However, with all the jiggling and jostling, the thought running through my head was that any moment now we were going to look down and see our arm hair was all tangled together and matted into some kind of unholy blonde and black tapestry.

Talk about awkward.

We’d have to spend the next 20 minutes trying to awkwardly untangle ourselves, and that would probably necessitate the one and only thing more uncomfortable than this urinal situation — small talk.

“Don’t worry, this happens all the time,” I’d end up nervously saying, although it certainly doesn’t and is clearly a lie.

Luckily, it never came to that, and apparently, this was all totally normal to these two Moroccan men. They went about their business with strong, manly streams. For me, it was like I was stuck in the middle seat of an airplane, where you can feel every minute muscle twitch and every exaggerated jiggle of the person on either side of you.

And boy, was there a lot of jiggling happening. I'm thinking, "Why is there so much jiggling happening, you guys?!? Didn't your dads teach you the three-shake rule?"

I wanted out of there and I started to panic. When your arms and shoulders are all touching and one person decides it's time for jiggling, like it or not, suddenly the rest of you are all jiggling too. But not to worry, my body had decided it was done with peeing ages ago.

"Not like this, Ryan. Never like this," my body seemed to be telling me.

I was mentally checked out, and physically just waiting for them to leave so I could continue peeing in peace. Under normal circumstances, I wouldn’t say that I’m especially pee shy, but then again, these weren’t normal circumstances. I was immediately transported back to my late teens and that miserable, traumatizing, period of my life when I was forced to pee in front of my icky probation officer.

Yes, when I was seventeen I had to pee into a tiny plastic cup while this preposterous little man stood and breathed down my neck from behind, and I had to do this on a bi-weekly basis.

That’s quite a fun story, and one that I highly recommend, so if you haven’t already, you can read about that HERE!