Strangest moments at Neurosciences ’04, Part II

You would think that the restrooms in a conference center full of PhD’s and grad students would be pretty tame, but no. I’d sooner go to the bathroom at a rock concert than run across a convention center floor with a colon full of fish taco (did I mention the conference was in San Diego?) only to find the kind of mess that was typical at Neurosciences and have to change direction at the last minute and run for the next gent’s, a mere football-field’s length away.

So anyway, there I am, rather anxiously scanning the john for an empty stall when I walk past a stall in which a tidy-looking middle-aged man in a navy suit is seated, pants around ankles, presumably doing what anyone would be there to do. The fact that he’s doing it with the door to the stall wide open is not the strangest part of the picture, however. No, the strangest part would have to be the blue latex gloves on the man’s hands.

An exhibitionist germ freak, I gather. Not that there’s anything...uh... so wrong with that, you just don’t see it every day, that’s all.