Forget about building a better mousetrap to get the world to beat a path to your door. All I had to do to achieve that result was write about my own humiliating bathroom experiences. I soon discovered that everyone has a once-upon-a-potty story, most of which, I regret to admit, are much funnier than mine.

Some stories are funny only in retrospect. One of my younger sisters, then recently potty-trained and pretty proud of it, shunned the potty-chair and scaled the family toilet to do her business. The incident was uneventful until mother heard a scream from the bathroom followed by my sister’s panicked explanation, “I’m in! I’m IN!”

With children, often the problem is not making it to the bathroom. I’ll never forget being on a tram going down Tennessee’s Lookout Mountain with a not-quite-2-year-old when a boy seated behind us exclaimed, “P.U.! What stinks?”

But adults are more likely to find themselves in a bathroom for a gender they are not. My friend Nancy learned the hard way not to allow an ophthalmologist to dilate her eyes just before a flight. Because her vision was too blurred to read the sign on the restroom door at the airport, she was blissfully unaware that she was in the wrong room until she exited the stall and saw two men utilizing the stainless steel assembly line against the wall. One of the men gave her a cheery, “Hello there!”

“I put my hands up at the sides of my face — I looked just like a horse wearing blinders — and got out of there as quickly as I could,” Nancy recounts. “I was absolutely humiliated!”

She had just managed to recover her composure and was waiting to board her plane when the man from the bathroom walked by and gave her a second friendly greeting: “Well, hello again!”

My friend Ann didn’t realize she had entered the wrong restroom until she saw a pair of men’s shoes and trousers pass by the stall where she was seated. “I just sat there real quiet until I was certain the room was empty, and then I hurried out!”

Women aren’t the only people who take a wrong restroom detour. Son Greg reminds me that he did a quick U-turn after entering a restaurant’s bathroom when he belatedly realized the exiting individual who had helpfully held open the door for him was female.

And my friend Bill ran into trouble while visiting a castle in England with his wife and a married couple who were longtime friends. Bill, who habitually whistles while he walks, entered a stall whistling and heard the familiar voice of his female friend query from the next stall, “Bill, is that you? You’ve docked at the wrong port.”

But that was a minor problem compared to Bill’s experience in a Russian bathroom, where he dropped his wallet containing $800 into the toilet.

“Wanna know what my first thought was when I heard that billfold plop into the goo?” asks Bill. “‘Man, am I gonna catch hell from my wife for having cash instead of travelers’ checks!'”

Though tempted to let filthy lucre lie, Bill fished it out, washed everything and dried out the cash.

Money is one of the few things I’ve never let fall into a toilet. But I have dropped three pairs of sunglasses, two bracelets, a watch, a lipstick and a paperback book in the foul waters of various toilets. I rescued and sanitized the glasses, bracelets and watch (it still worked after I dried it by draping it over a light bulb). I let the lipstick go down the drain and fished out the sopping wet book (only because it swelled to proportions too large to flush).

I still tease husband Ray about a visit he made to a bathroom in the ancient Mayan city of Tulume, Mexico. Ray speaks little Spanish, and in his urgency to reach the primitive bathroom it likely wouldn’t have mattered had he understood that the man guarding the door was demanding a peso for the use of the facilities. When Ray exited, all smiles, he used his scanty Spanish — “Gracias, señor! Muy gracias!” — to thank the man profusely. The man was still standing there slack-jawed and empty-handed when we walked away.

Ray was absolutely incensed when I told him that the man expected him to pay for using the bathroom. “That’s ridiculous,” he insisted. “Does he expect me to pay for breathing the air down here, too?”

Ray’s query brings up another question frequently encountered in public bathrooms. Should you breathe in those places? Probably … but I wouldn’t recommend it!