I’ve just come from the employee bathroom and I’m now vexed with this insipid question: Why don’t men flush the urinal?

It’s not a complicated duty. Pushing or pulling the lever is fairly self-explanatory and most of us learn how to do it at an early age. And even if you failed potty-training, there has to be some point in your life at which you learned what to do after you’ve drained the main vein and put it back in its hangar.

Flushing isn’t physically tasking. The lever itself isn’t heavy. Sure, it can be cold sometimes and you might wonder who else touched this small metal handle before you, but it’s still very easy to operate. You don’t even need hands to activate today’s flushers. In fact, I have on more than one occasion used my foot to flush the urinal, especially if the urinal in question is located in a particularly unsavory establishment.

But despite this relative straightforwardness and ease of operation, some idiots can’t seem to find the trigger within their Lilliputian brain that tells them to flush the toilet. Now, I could, once I’ve encountered some irresponsible slug’s canary weewee incubating in the urinal like a stagnant acidic pond, flush it and go on about my own business. But, why should I even be faced with this tasteless task?

Flushing the toilet is a responsibility and simple courtesy to those around us. Obviously, we are waste creating creatures. This means we must dispose of said waste. Certainly, the men who fail to flush urinals at work don’t do this in their homes. They don’t want excrement filling up their living space. And they don’t want their family to be forced to deal with another person’s excrement. (Those days should end when we — old or young — are out of diapers.) Why then would a man want excrement stuffing his working environment — where he spends nearly a third of his time?

Maybe, just maybe, these so-called men don’t know how distasteful failing to flush can be. If you’re one of these cretins, listen up. Urinating and not flushing is rude, irresponsible, lazy, and just plain ignorant.

If I ever notice a colleague leave the facilities without flushing the toilet, I will call him on it, and depending on my mood, I may do it loudly in the hearing range of others. That, or I’ll hit him flush in the face with my new Swingline. Such fools deserve nothing more.