Because humor is funnier when you know it's true.
Biz trip: Japan
As usual, my opportunity to see distant parts of the world came with the ‘opportunity’ to solve my company’s technical problems. Japan was no exception. In the past I had traveled through Japan, but I finally got to work in Japan multiple times thanks to some Japan-specific problems.
On one of those trips, I traveled with a team from our Tennessee manufacturing plant which included a very assertive woman who chain-smoked. The good news for her was that international flights back in the 90’s still had smoking sections. The bad news was that all of our flight’s smoking seats had already been assigned by the time she got to the counter. Upon boarding the plane, it dawned on her that she couldn’t light up. She suddenly stood up from her seat and loudly announced to the entire plane that she was NOT going to fly for 14 hours without a cigarette!! Fortunately, a nice gentleman had been assigned a smoking seat that he did not want, and so they traded. Violence avoided.
After landing at Tokyo’s very modern airport, I stopped in a men’s room, to relieve myself of hours of beverages. I decided to use a stall for more privacy than a urinal could provide, but was surprised to find that this particular stall had a porcelain-framed hole in the floor, not a toilet. What? Apparently the Japanese offer a squat version for Asian folks in addition to the good old throne for Westerners. While Americans complained that squatting over a hole (especially in a business suit) was crude at best, the Japanese countered that American toilets were even cruder in allowing a continuous succession of human butts to sit on the same seat, all day, every day. They had a point.
Not to dwell on toilet talk, but on another visit to a Tokyo airport restroom, I was careful to pick a Western stall. Suddenly I heard loud noises from the man in the next stall. He was erupting with very loud grunts, and slamming our shared wall. What the HELL was he doing in there? It was like he was a having a karate fight with his stall. I learned later from a worldly coworker that a lot of Japanese men have diets of excessive rice coupled with excessive alcohol consumption, apparently a deadly constipating combination. Good to know.