What's with the tabo???

When a new group moved into our floor, the first thing that struck us was how different they were from us.

There were a lot of females, and they seemed to go to the toilet and the pantry in groups. They were a noisy lot too. It seemed normal for them to be conversing while inside the urinal too.

I learned to put up with the noise, the mess in the pantry and generally avoided the lunchtime crowd that gathered there to get water or heat their food. But what I could not avoid was the tabo.



It appeared in the toilet on day one. Believe me, the office does not provide tabos, so we had to assume that the group brought it with them. What is a tabo, anyway? It's a big, wide plastic container, often referred to as a water dipper. It's the equivalent of a manual bidet. Yes, it is used to wash oneself after using the toilet.

A tabo is common in a Filipino household. Although we have a bidet installed in our toilets at home, we still have a tabo and pail-- which we use when we clean the floor of the bathroom. I have no complaints to using a tabo to clean oneself after doing your thing at home. But at the office - where you share a restroom with some 50 other females?

Of course, we started having wet, soiled and messy floors. We also started having wet toilet seats - wet from what, we couldn't even start to imagine. If it was water, we were sure it was water that had been spilled from washing someone's butt. And you wouldn't want to come into contact with THAT.

What amazed me was how normal it was for just about everyone else in the other group to use the tabo. They were even willing to lose their turn to get into a cubicle if the tabo was still in use. In exasperation, one of my officemates hid it one day. The very next day, a new one appeared. No kidding.

One time, a colleague asked me if we were the ones with poor hygiene because we didn't use the tabo. In the eyes of the other group, we probably were the savages. Never mind if we used toilet paper and/or spritzers.

We've already complained about how our restroom seems to be perpetually wet and dirty and the response was just a reminder to our utility to keep it clean at all times. Poor woman. She's keeps mopping the floors and emptying the garbage of overflowing tissue paper.

We have resigned ourselves to the fact that we will probably never see eye to eye with our new neighbors when it comes to toilet use. But we will never get used to it.