BATHROOM DESIGNER #1: Okay, so I think we’re pretty much set here. There’s not a lot of space, it’s single-occupancy, we’ve got a sink, a toilet, a blow dryer, a trash can –
BATHROOM DESIGNER #2: Full length mirror.
BATHROOM DESIGNER #1: What?
BATHROOM DESIGNER #2: Full. Length. Mirror.
BATHROOM DESIGNER #1: What about it?
BATHROOM DESIGNER #2: We need a full length mirror.
BATHROOM DESIGNER #1: Where?
BATHROOM DESIGNER #2: Hanging on the inside of the bathroom door, directly facing the toilet, such that whoever uses is it forced to make eye contact with herself as she uses the facilities.
BATHROOM DESIGNER #1: Why would she…what purpose would that serve?
BATHROOM DESIGNER #2: Honesty.
BATHROOM DESIGNER #1: And that’s a, that’s a need you think customers will want to have met during their bathroom facility?
BATHROOM DESIGNER #2: You’re in the middle of a nice dinner. You realize you have to use the bathroom. You shouldn’t be allowed to sit there on the toilet and pretend you’re not one step removed from a goddamn animal.
BATHROOM DESIGNER #1: There’s already a mirror over the sink, if you want to check your reflection while you’re washing your hands.
BATHROOM DESIGNER #2: NOT GOOD ENOUGH.
BATHROOM DESIGNER #1: I…okay.
BATHROOM DESIGNER #2: You should have to look at yourself, in a full-length mirror, while you’re on the toilet.
BATHROOM DESIGNER #1: I’ll add that to the list of want-to-haves.
BATHROOM DESIGNER #2: Alternately.
BATHROOM DESIGNER #1: Alternately?
BATHROOM DESIGNER #2: We could put a stall in.
BATHROOM DESIGNER #1: A stall in a single-occupancy restroom?
BATHROOM DESIGNER #2: Yes.
BATHROOM DESIGNER #1: So there’s the door, and then a stall, and then the only toilet?
BATHROOM DESIGNER #2: Yes.
BATHROOM DESIGNER #1: And what end would that serve, exactly? Having the one stall, if there’s only one toilet?
BATHROOM DESIGNER #2: So someone else can open the door, scan the stall, realize there’s only one, and then stand in front of the sink and listen to you use the bathroom.
BATHROOM DESIGNER #1: Oh.
BATHROOM DESIGNER #2: I would have thought that would be fairly obvious.
FIN
Tags: bathrooms, design, dialogue, like why though
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“Can we hide something important? I’m thinking…thr flusher, the soap, maybe the hand dryer. Not the taps, though–it should be easy to get their hands wet but really difficult to dry.”
“What earthly purpose would that serve?”
“I like an element of challenge in my washrooms.”
Those automatic faucets never work for me in restaurant/other public bathrooms, leading me to wonder if I’m not in fact corporeal, but only a wraith with serious delusions.
I always have terrible difficulty with them, and try a couple before getting one to work, by which point usually someone else has walked up to the ones I unsuccessfully tried previously and use them with no trouble, so….I spent a lot of time looking/feeling like a total idiot in public restrooms. Particularly in airports.
The length and vigor with which I routinely have to wave at those stupid automatic paper towel dispensers would lead an outside observer to conclude that we are, in fact, long lost friends.
I’ve always assumed the mirror is there for people who are simply too busy to use the toilet and then fix their hair and makeup.
“The three seconds I saved touching up my lipstick while peeing sure are valuable!”
I like when they have Listerine dispensers which allow the restaurant to feel classy and the patrons feel stupid when they try to wash their hands with Listerine.
“We’re in a climate where it’s cool or cold 3/4 of the year? Let’s save $20 by not installing any hooks inside the stalls.”
“I just spotted these adorable tiny knobs in the catalog? They’re definitely not going to hold anyone’s overcoat, let alone a purse, but they provide the illusion of convenience!”
“Better yet–let’s do away with individual hooks and put a communal one by the bathroom door!”
“Brilliant! We are in a sharing economy, after all.”
Walking in to a restroom in the middle of winter and seeing there are no hooks is THE LITERAL WORST!
In a restaurant, aren’t you leaving your coat at the table? I get angry if there are no purse knobs, but I typically remove my coat.
I recently encountered a public bathroom that had flimsy coat hooks not on the stall doors but on the wall right above the toilet. God help you if your coat is longer than knee length, but at least you can lean against it while you do your business for a warm and cozy feeling.
One of the restrooms in the classroom building for my grad program did have individual hooks on each stall door — on the outside. Facing the row of sinks.
WHY.
no no no the mirror is supposed to FACE the door, so the user thinks they’ve walked in on someone when they see their reflection! IT ADDS AN ELEMENT OF SURPRISE AND HUMILITY TO THEIR DAY
FINE we’ll compromise, we’ll put a mirror on the door AND the opposite wall. Infinite reflections aren’t creepy, right?
That was definitely an element of a stress nightmare I had once. (My stress dreams often involve being somehow exposed in bathroom situations; my subconscious is not terribly subtle sometimes.)
There was a bathroom I used in a railway station where all 4 walls of each stall were highly polished metal that was almost a mirror. So you were trapped inside a box of 4 full-length mirrors, each creating their own infinite reflections, showing you pooping. That is definitely someone’s fetish, but not mine.
Sadly they modernised the station last year and moved the bathrooms, and the new ones were just calm cream boxes.
“If we put the stall in the single-occupancy bathroom, can we at least make sure the stall door can’t quite open all the way?”
“I mean, I guess…”
“OH, and let’s make sure the bathroom door can’t quite open all the way, too!”
“What? Wait, so neither door can completely open? Why would we do that??”
“We want people to be challenged! Honestly, do you want the human population to be complacent in life, or do you want to give them a little challenge once in a while? It builds character. Also, it’s funny.”
“Make sure the stall door opens IN toward the toilet.”
“Why?”
“So we can make sure people have to uncomfortably hurdle over the toilet to escape the stall!”
THIS. This is my greatest pet peeve, multiplied by a thousand when such a stall is in an airport and not a restaurant. Life is hard enough when I have to take my carry-on into the stall with me. Throw me a bone by not making me straddle the toilet to get the door open wide enough to get my bag out.
Airport washrooms are their own special hell.
c’mon, when people have spent hours trapped in a canister, give them nice washrooms with no lines, and comfy sized stalls. you’re an airport!! You have room for it!!!
Not to mention, everyone in an airport is clinging to a giant pile of bags lest leaving them unattended for two minutes triggers a National Security Lockdown. Maybe make the stalls a big bigger to accommodate that? MAYBE??
In LAX, I encountered a bathroom stall large enough for everyone’s bags, with room left over for me to dance the entire Nutcracker, sleigh, tree and all. The rest of the stalls were “fun sized”, whereas this one could have made room for three or ten of the other.
As I peed quietly in the toilet in the corner, gazing out over my vast expanse, I considered my 30 minute wait and the line of forty bulging-bladder ladies desperately waiting. Then I soberly wondered where the handicapped stall was.
also, please, a counter upon which to rest the objects in my hands whilst I wash them. Preferably not just the counter the sink is on, as those universally have water on them.
Go to Iceland! I mean, probably not just to use the Keflavik airport bathrooms — there are other reasons to visit Iceland. BUT, the bathrooms in the Keflavik airport are So. Excellent. Each stall is like its own private little room — the doors are full-length, and the walls are real walls, not cubicle/partition walls, so it is like a large communal bathrooms full of single-sized private bathrooms, and each one has a toilet, a sink with actual counter space, and a really space-age hand dryer that is somehow part of the sink faucet, and I don’t know how to explain it but trust me, it’s cool. It is the best thing to get off a long flight at 7:00am, go lock yourself into a private — and always shockingly clean — little bathroom, and take as much time as you need to brush your teeth/gaze in horror at your dehydrated face/maybe change your shirt or whatever. It’s great, and one of the nicest things about flying to Europe on IcelandAir.
Oh, I hate that most of all!
“It would be good if they didn’t really close, either. Like, male sure there’s at least a two inch gap at all times”
“Um…. Okay?”
“Or, even better, make sure the lock is so flimsy it might fall off any minute!”
“How would that be a good idea?”
“It makes people think about what they value more, freedom or process privacy!”
Oh my GOD I used to work at a bank that had an employees-only restroom with the one-stall setup, and I had a coworker who would pull the “I’m going to stand here in the communal area like I’m waiting in line in a normal multi-stall public restroom, but really it’s just the two of us and I could just as easily see that the bathroom is no longer occupied from my desk so that you could have your privacy, but nope, I’m gonna stand here and wait and ALSO MAKE SMALL TALK WHILE YOU ARE IN THE STALL.” It was a nightmare.
But the Ladies’ restroom was the source of the best info when I worked on Wall Street. My manager did HR for a large division of a huge securities company. When he and I talked over, in private, who was going to need family leave or who seemed to be preparing to leave the company, I would chime in with more accurate info. “How do you know that?” “Oh, I heard it in the Ladies’ Room. Yes, she said so herself.” He was amazed at how much I knew and how quickly. Just listening to the gossip at the bank of 15 sinks.
But no one spoke to anyone in the stalls. Ever. That would be vulgar.
“How many stalls can we get in here and still meet building code guidelines?”
“Three, but two would really make more–”
“Three it is! Just put the doors really close to the toilet and have them open inward so that there’s plenty of space out by the sinks. It’s not like people have to move around much when they’re in there. And throw a huge potted plant with scrapy branches right by the main door.”
Let’s cram five stalls in here so that you really feel like you’re sitting in the lap of the person in the stall next to you while you do your business.
It is even more infuriating when they make the doors to handicapped stalls open inward. Like, the stall is TECHNICALLY wide enough to accommodate a wheelchair, but in order enter/exit the stall, the person would have to be able to be able to condense themselves to be about 8 inches wide.
The last thing you want when going out for Korean BBQ is “honesty.” I speak from experience.
Also we need to start getting some continuity with sinks in a bathroom. Can we admit that the push faucets are a failure? And the auto start sinks are just unnecessary and make me look like a fool when I hold my hands under any other sink, waiting for a water flow that will never come.
I have pretty much come to the conclusion that I am a ghost, because auto-start sinks just refuse to acknowledge my corporeal form.
That moment of panic when you already have the soap on your hands and nothing happens when you wave them under the sink. nooooooooo
I can never find the sensors either. One of the hotels I often go to meetings at has automated everything (water, soap, toilets, paper towels, door) so I spend a lot of time waving my hands around trying to get things to work there.
On the flip side, I have come to the conclusion that the automated towel dispensers in my office CAN sense ghosts, because they routinely dispense towels when there is nothing visible moving within 10 feet of them.
How thoughtful of your office to cater to Undead Rights! I guess it makes up for the vampires all walking past the mirrors like “yeah, yeah, don’t rub it in.”
There are 3 sinks in the women’s washrooms on my floor at work, all automatic faucets. Two of them have normal water pressure but the third erupts with all the force of a geyser. I suspect that particular bathroom designer is deliberately trying to abrade the skin right off our hands.
we have one that is cold water (which it is clearly labeled as), and two that are hot, except that one of them is TOO hot, while the last is just right, so there’s a whole Goldilocks situation with our bathroom sinks
A movie theatre/furniture store (already, why) near me has a horrible funpark themed women’s toilet and the stall doors contain ONE-WAY MIRRORS. So if you’re outside the stalls you see your reflection, but if you’re inside the stall going about your business you get to have the panicked moment of seeing other people walking around outside the stall, because no matter how you tell yourself they cannot see you, WHAT IF THEY CAN. WHAT IF THEY CAN.
that sounds like a nightmare!
Jordan’s! I HATE that bathroom. It’s like whoever designed that thought ‘How can we provoke anxiety in our customers?’
At least they have that Jelly Belly store, so you can buy entirely too many of your favorite flavor jelly beans and then feel gross while you watch a movie in IMAX 3D.
Oh god. I’ve only been there once (to see the first Hobbit movie- highly recommended to watch a movie with sweeping panoramic vistas at a Jordan’s) but never had to use the restroom there. I WILL NEVER GO THERE AGAIN.
Imagining, also, people stopping outside the bathroom stall and CHECKING THEIR REFLECTION while it seems like their just intently staring at you on the toilet.
this is a literal nightmare.
and also a weird way to treat paying customers that presumably you’d like to see again?
D: D: D:
Oh my god oh my god why
That’s really messed up. Who would think of that and then not immediately go, ‘wow, I should stop drinking’?
A restaurant near me has this! Supposedly it was a popular feature in the 1960s (this restaurant isn’t from then but has 50s/60s-inspired decor). I was there last weekend, and the person I was with went to the bathroom and saw a woman with her face pressed up against the glass. He said, “It’s weird, isn’t it?” and she jumped a foot and said, “My [child-aged] son is in there–you must think I’m a pervert.” Basically, those toilets are a setup for awkward.
oh my god. OH MY GOD.
There’s a pub I know where the stall doors have slats. They are angled like outside/inside. From the outside you can’t see in. But from the inside it’s insideoutside so you can definitely see out. I know it’s to bring in the light, and it is kinda cool, but I’m always thankful when no-one else is in there.
Apparently the technical term is louvered doors, google tells me.
Hmm, are bathroom designers descendants of the Two Monks?
Monk 1: so I have a few questions about this rule of chastity thing?
Monk 2: no don’t worry about it Brosephus, that’s really more of a “suggestion” than a “rule”
Monk 1 nice nice
(They fist-bump)
Two Monks reincarnated.
“Should we center the toilet within the stall?”
“No, I think it’s best if your thigh is touching the wall on one side and you can’t reach the toilet paper on the other.”
Guys, the bathrooms at my school are the BEST places to encounter hilarious stall graffiti. You get to read entire conversations while you wee. A recent favorite:
“It is both a blessing and a curse to feel everything so deeply.”
“STFU THIS AIN’T TUMBLR BITCH”
my college’s bathroom graffiti was AMAZING. I can’t remember anything in particular now, but they were great and meta and riffed across and through each other and it made bathrooming highly enjoyable. long paragraphs and little quips and asynchronous arguments
YES. At my college, the English building’s graffiti was the best, but I did find a gem in one of the math/science-y buildings. Someone had written “God = Love” in seriousness, and subsequent students had carried on with that mathematical assumption. “God/Love = 1” “God^2 = (Love x Love)”
I am seriously still miffed by them painting over the lovely graffiti convos at my college. I’ve tried to start a think where we scratch off the paint to write but it’s too labor intensive I suppose.
I love emo bathroom graffiti. Although I also love the bar in my area where there’s a huge scrawl of “Fuck the gender binary!” across the front of one of the stalls.
Kings in Ballard??
Anarchists and Trotskyists at McGill have full-length debates about tactics via graffiti in the women’s in the basement of the SSMU building. Hilarious and educational!
College of Art and Design bathroom graffiti!
There’s something similar in a bathroom in my friend’s bar. She’s made it a personal crusade to cover up the crude graffiti while leaving the clever and now it sort of looks like a shrine I think?
“Congratulations! You have chosen the Toilet of Exceptional Merit. It is large, well-lit, and in a convenient, central location.”
Actually, that wasn’t graffiti. Someone had printed that out and taped it to the inside of the door.
“The sinks need soap, right? We should put in three or so soap dispensers for this row”
“Ooh!! I have an even better idea — let’s make two of them hand sanitizer dispensers and it can be a win win guessing game”
“Perfect! Everyone loves Purell and hot water!”
My favorite restaurant has one glaring flaw…an UNLABELED mouthwash dispenser right next to the soap dispenser. And for some reason that smell just doesn’t wash off.
Also, make sure either the soap or the paper towel dispenser are extremely high.
Why would we do that?
So that water runs down their arms to the elbow and soaks their sleeves while they’re trying to use them, silly.
“Let’s see, this is a movie theater women’s restroom with 20 stalls. How many sinks should we have?”
“I’m thinking… three?”
“Perfect, you’re a genius! And the soap dispenser can go right at the end of the line of sinks, so that it’s totally useless anytime anyone is using the sink at that end, which will be always. Man, this is looking great so far… what about the automatic hand dryer, where should we put that?”
“How about on the one blank wall, in the only place a line can possibly form, so that anyone waiting for a stall to open up will a) block access to the dryer and b) constantly trigger it with their elbow?”
“PERFECT.”
So… Do you think a one to one ratio of toilets to sinks is best?
No. Maybe four sinks for every toilet. Or one sink for every three toilets. Those are the best ratios.
What about counterspace? Ladies sometimes have handbags to set down?
No, no, no. You’re confusing handbags with hand grenades. Counterspace only encourages ladies to leave their hand grenades behind. Let’s have very little counterspace, and make sure that the taps somehow splash all over, so the space is limited and wet.
Okay.
And there are going to be six sinks? No need for more than one hand dryer!
Restaurant near my office:
“So we don’t have much space to work with. Let’s just put one stall in here and call it good.”
“Aim higher. We can easily fit two stalls in here.”
“But that would mean you’d…”
“You’d have to go through the first stall to get to the second one. Exactly.”
“So if you’re in the second stall you’d have to just wait to get out until the other person is finished?”
“It adds a nice element of chance to the whole thing don’t you think? A nice game of will my food still be warm by the time I regain my freedom?”
The classroom building for my major department when I was an undergraduate worked that way. There were two stalls in the women’s bathroom, but you had to go through one to get to the other. Because of this, most people just used the first stall and locked it, which meant there was effectively one stall.
I NEVER got why the designers thought this was a good idea. I know they were working with an oddly-shaped space that had never been intended to be a bathroom, and I’m sure that in terms of square footage, it made perfect sense to have two stalls, but when that was your only possible arrangement, WHY.
Honestly? Probably to get around a law. A lot of places have laws specifying the number of working bathrooms/toilets a public facility needs to have, and TECHNICALLY they just have to exist and be operational and accessible. Because there is no legal principle so sensible that somebody won’t exploit it for the sake of their own convenience.
my god. I cannot imagine this. And to hear that it is not a singular occurrence…
WHAT
NO
How would you … Why would they … D: D: D:
Point being, they had to make a sign.
My college dorm bathroom could have used this sign.
My goddamn workplace breakroom can use this sign. Today was notable for NO squidgy ramen leftovers in the communal sink.
As a bright eyed fresh from college young thing I worked at a children’s community center/play space and had to create signs to get people to stop flushing every damn thing down the toilet.
Food, Diapers, Toys, you name it. Mayyybe some of the flushing was done by children, but O_o?
It would clog and close the bathrooms every time.
Telling a room full of parents with toddlers that there are no bathrooms available creates this tense moment of silence similar only to those horribly still moments in Spaghetti Western films. You aren’t sure how it’s gonna manifest, but you know you’re a hair’s breadth away from something BAD going down. Usually it was people who insisted on marching – either into the stinky bathroom anyway only to return EXTRA angry or away from the estabilshment yelling about how dreadful we were.
Also, there were only 2 stalls. WTF, people who designed the bathrooms for this community center, WTF
in my work building, we have bathrooms for every floor, and so far the different floor bathrooms I’ve seen all have different warning signs. Floor 10 is “PLEASE DO NOT FLUSH PAPER TOWELS DOWN THE TOILET”. Floor 9 is “PLEASE FLUSH THE TOILET” Floor 8 is “DO NOT FLUSH TAMPONS DOWN THE TOILET THANK YOU.” I’m excited to see what different problems floors 1-7 have.
that bathroom looks disturbingly familiar, and I don’t know if it’s just b/c bathrooms look so similar (and I’ve definitely been in ones with that sign) or if it’s because I have been in that bathroom.
It’s a state government building.
The various toilets at my university have a wide range of signs inside. One says “Do NOT [bold, capitals, larger font size] flush TAMPONS [bold and caps, but same size as the rest] or other sanitary products down the toilet”; despite this injunction, one stall out of the three seems to be blocked a lot of the time. Another just has signs in every cubicle saying, “FLUSH THE TOILET! HAVE SOME RESPECT!”. I feel for whoever was moved to make them. (Some have been annotated by people pointing out that the flush mechanism doesn’t work very well. Possibly they have no respect.)
Is this bathroom for ladies? Do you think they might want a place to leave garbage while inside the stall?
No, it should be right at the door, or whatever is the furthest location possible from the stall. Also it never needs to be emptied, as long as there’s a passive-aggressive sign about not putting “ladie’s items” in the toilet.
YES, if you have a sign up about what not to do with feminine hygiene products, it’s required by law to have at least one misspelled word or misplaced apostrophe in it.
This should also be a warning to all dudes who do not live with women: FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, put a wastebasket in your bathroom. So that your guests do not need to choose between potentially destroying your plumbing system and carrying a bloody tampon out into your home in search of a receptacle.
Now that I’m on the subject: dudes, if you want me to shower in your house, you need to keep some kind of soap in there that is not Middle School Anxiety(TM) Scented Axe combination shampoo/body wash
when I visit my boyfriend’s parents I am always ASTOUNDED by their weird bathroom stuff. In their master bathroom, they have no trash receptacle, and NO SOAP. ??? The truly, truly weird thing is that they do all wash their hands with soap (or at least when I’m around), they just walk like 25 feet to the kitchen, where they wash their hands with DISH SOAP!?! They are not poor, hand soap is not a rare supply, I don’t understand why they don’t just buy some for their master bath? And why, when they need to throw something away, they would want to walk 25 feet to throw it away. I know that everyone else’s family seems weird, but I feel like this is truly strange. The BF does not see the strangeness.
What do you suppose would happen if you bought them, like, a nice sampler of high-end hand soaps for Christmas? Would they put them in the bathroom, or by the kitchen sink, or maybe just re-gift them so that you never see evidence that the soap was ever even there? It would be EXTREMELY passive-aggressive, but I’m really curious!
I am just now seeing this, but that is genius! I will definitely think of doing this
I was once staying at a friend’s house and having a horrifically heavy period, and the bin in the bathroom was just a wicker thing with no lid or bin liner. I don’t know what she or her mother did with period-related things. (My rule: bathroom bins should always have lids to minimise the sight and smell of potentially messy things, and have a liner so they can be emptied easily without stuff sticking to the sides. I thought it was universal.)
I am still bitter at my middle school bathrooms for not having those teeny stall trash cans. Sitting in that dang stall trying to wrap enough TP around a pad to disguise it and HIDE MY SHAAAME on my way to the trash can in the common area (and what are you supposed to do with it while you pull your pants back on? We’re 12, we don’t have the logistics of this thing down yet). Shockingly, the toilets were often clogged.
The bathroom in my office has very old metal trash cans in the stalls that go SKRONK when you open the lid so everyone in their offices down the hall can hear you throwing away your ‘ladie’s items’.
Somehow, saying “SKRONK” out loud is making me laugh far harder than it probably should.
They recently *removed* the in-stall wastebaskets from every bathroom in the Washington state ferry system, both on the boats and in the terminals. The ferries that countless numbers of people use to commute every day. Now they just have these sad metal stands where the wastebaskets used to be, taunting all of their female passengers. Every time I have to use the bathroom on a ferry, I am filled with rage.
Forgive my male ignorance, but they put mirrors on the inside of women’s room stalls? Bizarre.
Not on stall doors, more like on the inside of door doors in a single-occupant restroom. Which are often gender-neutral, so I’m surprised you haven’t come across them! (Thinking of this one bar, with gender-neutral restrooms that have floor-to-ceiling mirrors on one wall. Not only a weird mirror situation, it makes the room feel huge.)
Ah I see now, I must’ve read that incorrectly. I think I have seen those, but maybe not that often? That makes more sense though.
Horrifyingly, I have seen them on the inside of stall doors.
gah why? And…like…a typical stall door isn’t super stable and can’t support a ton of weight. They’re opening and shutting all the time. You’re asking for broken mirror eventually.
I was in a single occupant bathroom once where there was no stall and ALL THE WALLS FROM WAIST HEIGHT DOWN WERE MIRRORS. It was the single most terrifying bathroom experience of my life.
Also I peed with my eyes closed.
We do not forgive.
We do not forget.
Your name is in the Annals for when the revolution comes.
How unfair! This is a real red-pill moment.
Male privilege is being allowed to sit there on the toilet and pretend you’re not one step removed from a goddamn animal.
I’m a lady, have never seen this that I can remember. Is it possible that it’s more common in another area of the country (other than California, where I was born and raised)?
I live in California and I can think of a couple of restaurants that have the mirror on the inside of the stall door thing… it’s terrible.
“I know! Let’s make the doors out of frosted glass that only frosts up when you lock the door so that you can see that the bathrooms are empty!”
“But what if the frost mechanism stops working?”
“Then everyone gets to see you pee, it’s like dinner and a show at no extra charge!”
whut
Yup. And that leads directly into A Conversation Between Coworkers at a Restaurant:
“Should we, uh…should we tell Tom that his door isn’t working?”
“…no. Let’s never speak of this again.”
THIS MECHANISM SHOULD NOT EXIST
noooooo
#1: “OK so here I installed a roll of ShopKo paper towel.”
#2: “Let’s install battery-powered motion-sensor dispensers!”
#1: “What?”
#2: “You wave your hand, and four inches of non-absorbent proprietary-brand paper towel comes out!”
#1: “Well…”
#2: “I mean, if the batteries aren’t dead.”
#1: “So-”
#2: “And the paper’s not jammed.”
#1: “I just think-”
#2: “And your hand is really close, but, like, not TOO close.”
#1: “OK but…. What problem is that solving?”
#2: “…It’s hands-free!”
#1: “OK…”
#2: “Infrared!”
#1: “It’s just… We are losing our tactile connection to our environment. We too often forget the human element in everyday design: the many shapes of the human hand; the serenity of open space; the accessibility of smooth terrain. We forget that we are making things to be experienced and to be used and to be helpful.”
#2: “…OK but….wi-fi!”
#1: *eats own face*
“Okay, compromise: let’s get a super-powerful spring-loaded dispenser and then fill it with tri-fold towels with the tensile strength of tissue paper. That way the towels stay in there real good.”
“But won’t they just rip into tiny shreds when people grab at them with wet hands, until they ultimately have to reach into the dispenser and pull out an inch-thick pile of them?”
“Oh, right. In that case, let’s just pile them in a basket on the countertop where they can get all wet and disorganized.”
“Let’s jam far too many towels into the super-powerful spring-loaded dispenser so that people come away with either 75 towels or the shreds of one towel but nothing in between.”
My workplace bathroom has automated flush toilets, automatic taps, automatic soap dispensers, and automated paper towel dispensers. Which is great, except that I make a fool of myself in every other public bathroom, holding my hands out and waiting for my electronic servant to fulfill my sanitary needs.
The paper towel dispenser is unusual in that you have to wave your hand under it, not in front. The instructions on the dispenser are carefully placed so that anyone over five foot five is unable to see them. I am five foot one. I spend a lot of time waving my hand under the dispenser for the benefit of confused customers.
#3 I’ve got an even better idea. Let’s install hands-free sensors on the towel dispensors and toilets in all the bathrooms at the Institute for the Blind.
#1 & #2: Huh?
#3: That way, blind people won’t be able to get their towels by feel, or flush the toilet by pushing the handle. They’ll have to wave around aimlessly for towels and be surprised (and splashed) by the gratutious flushing. Just like sighted people.
#1 & #2: Huh?
#3: True equality all round!
It all came together when I realized “oh no…she isn’t making this up.”
We have mirrors in the stalls at work. I like what I imagine the idea behind that to be. Everyone up to SVP experiences the same thing. Keeps us all humble.
I mean there is really no way that’s the reason for it I just don’t want to think they did that because they thought… it… would… be… nice.
Where should we place the toilet paper dispenser?
How about placing it so low that the user has to awkwardly bend and twist in order to reach up inside it to get the paper. Ladies like to be limbered up.
Or place it at just the right height that people getting up off the toilet in their narrow stall first bang their elbow and then gash open the side of their leg on it.
I was in a hotel recently that had this setup in the en-suite. I don’t want to have to get completely off the toilet to get toilet paper! That’s just inefficient.
So I used to live in an apartment with this mirror situation. Except the mirror wasn’t on the back of the door. It covered the entire wall between the door and the bathtub, carefully put together from square-foot pieces, reaching from the floor almost to the ceiling, facing the toilet.
When I moved into my coop, the bathroom had 1) a huge mirror over the sink, approximately 5′ square; 2) a mirrored sliding door on the tub; 3) a mirror on the back of the door and a mirror on the medicine cabinet next to it; 4) AN ENTIRE WALL OF FLOOR-TO-CEILING MIRROR TILES DIRECTLY OPPOSITE THE TOILET. I was just surprised the previous owner hadn’t mirrored the ceiling and floor while she was at it. (The place also had two other completely mirrored walls, one in the hall and the other in the dining room–though that one was a feature of every unit in the complex and the two other complexes next door put up by the same builder at the same time–and there were signs that there had been a huge mirror in the bedroom glued to the wall and wrenched out with little consideration for the plaster). Really, who the hell put up mirrors so that you’re forced to watch yourself pee every single day of your life? Thus, my first act as a homeowner was hiring someone to remove 5 zillion mirror tiles without completely destroying my walls.
What the… WHAT. NO.
A million eyes, always watching. Always someone skulking just out of sight, movement flickering in the corner of your eye. They’re all you, but none is real…
whyyyy
And just think about what happens if a house centipede crawls out of the drain. MILLIONS OF MIRROR-CENTIPEDES, all flickering in the corner of your eye.
See, I never got why the fear of centipedes is so common on the internet. For bugs, they’re really kind of cute! They’re small and neat, like 3 cm (1.5 inch), sleek and shiny, and the legs are tiny and barely visible, and there’s no weird or gross stuff like antennae or extra what-even-is-this body parts with no obvious function except grossing people out. Why the hate?
One day I was innocently surfing the internet and clicked on a thread where people discussed animals they’d seen. I probably expected fuzzy pictures of rare birds, colourful beetles and a baby rabbit someone found under their porch, because I remember seeing these threads before. There was a centipede vs millipede discussion, and I realised I didn’t know there was a difference, so I clicked the links to be educated. One of the pictures showed a normal one, and so I expected the other to be similar but maybe with fewer legs. But there was something… wrong. The other link did not show my tiny caterpillar-but-with-body-armour creature. It depicted a HUGE, BILLION-LEGGED DEMON OUT OF HELL, as big as a human hand, absolutely COVERED in antennae, weird wavy things, extra legs and nightmare fuel, like if someone had stitched fifteen large yellow segmented spiders together in a row and not even bothered to get all the legs pointing the right direction.
And that is how l was enlightened about the American centipede.
no ocean is big enough
Let me increase your horror with the information that here in the US we call them… house centipedes.
I went to Taco Bell last week and ran to the bathroom before I ordered – TWO TOILETS IN THE SAME ROOM. No stalls, no dividers, no anything. Just two toilets (each with their own TP dispenser), and a sink across the room. I stopped in the doorway and just stared for a ridiculous amount of time, and then of course took/texted a picture to everyone I knew.
Imgur is great you know.
“Full Metal Jacket” really gave me a fear of the military. All those unstalled toilets in one room. “I am NOT doing that.”
I was recently at a mid-range Boston restaurant that I can’t remember the name of, and in addition to there being only one single bathroom for women (which was not enough), my friends informed me that the men’s room had a toilet and a urinal, with no dividers and no locking door.
I….may have perpetuated a toilet + urinal single occupancy restroom upon the world recently (although not entirely willingly…). In this case it basically came down to a) men are gross b) men don’t like to sit down to pee and c) men don’t like to touch toilet seats. So…since it will mainly be used by men, it gets a urinal and a toilet. And the urinal is now directly adjacent to the sink due to a variety of unavoidable existing conditions that is going to make this one of the strangest single occupant restrooms anyone has ever used.
Does it have a door that locks? Because then at least it would clearly be a single occupancy restroom. The door of this men’s room was the kind of lockless door you’d expect to see in a multiple-occupancy bathroom with actual stalls.
It led to a lot of surprised yelling.
A bar in the east village has the same set up.
There’s a dive in Austin that has this going on but I sort of thought it was a joke for drunk people or something
I’ve run into a few of those at the start of hiking trails. Or have been in a few that did have the dividers, but no stall doors. The best was on a trail about 7 miles up. At the overlook is a little side trail to the toilet. I go up the trail, and there is a completely open air toilet. No doors, no roof, no walls. No nothing, but you on your throne looking out onto the vast expanse (there were trees hiding you from the main overlook area, but unless you brought a friend to block the side trail, there were going to be people walking directly by). It was also a compostable/biodegradable toilet and told me I couldn’t poop there. So, someone has to hold it for another 7 miles back to the ones in the parking lot? That’s just asking for trouble on the trails man.
somehow that sounds like something designed by a man, just a wild guess
When I was in middle school, we played volleyball at a school that had stall walls but not doors. Because you know what would be really great for a lot of newly pubescent and uh-oh-I-just-became-pubescent girls? Knowing everyone who walks by can see them struggle with their “ladie’s products.”
“There are three sinks, where should we put the soap dispenser, hand dryer, and the hand towel dispenser that we don’t stock?”
“How about on the wall next to the third sink so they are all completely inaccessible if someone happens to be using that sink?”
“Great idea! We certainly should use that instead of literally any other wall in this bathroom.”
Every morning there is someone using the sink next to the soap and dryer to put on their makeup, and every morning I get so fucking mad.
The library where I work is like that, with the addition of putting the trash can directly under the towel dispenser next to the sink. Housekeeping eventually dragged another trash can in from somewhere else in the building because they got tired of students throwing wet paper towels at the trash can and missing.
1: I know, what about a place for someone to hang coats or bags?
2: Why would we need that? We are in a shopping mall in the Midwest!
1: Right, right, you’re right. No hooks, no shelves.
In the basement of my college housing there was a bathroom with two toilets. And no stalls.
I lived in a little house (on campus) my sophomore year – five people, upstairs had a half bath, and downstairs had a toilet, a sink, and two miniscule showers all in the same room. We were all pretty open, but I don’t remember two people ever using that bathroom at the same time. One big shower would have been sooooo much nicer!
Like the Sochi toilets! http://deadspin.com/a-users-guide-to-the-bizarre-…
When I was in college, there was a bar my boyfriend really liked that had three stalls, but one had a beaded curtain instead of a door. NOBODY EVER USED THAT STALL. Why would you do that??? It’s not like beaded curtains provide any real coverage.
There’s a karaoke place by me that has two stalls. There’s one you access by a real, honest-to-goodness, with-a-handle door, and there’s one separated by a fabric curtain. Guess which one is in the room with the sink and the door to the outside.
I stayed in an AirBnB that had something even worse than the full length mirror. It had a small, compact mirror facing the toilet so that the only POSSIBLE purpose it could serve was confronting you with all the faces you make when giving birth to a poo baby. Otherwise, it was useful for looking at your ankles.
POO BABY
My university residence had bathroom stalls in the hallway. Like, you’d be walking down the long hallway with people’s rooms to your right and left, and at intervals the carpeted floor would change to tile and the doors would change to bathroom stall doors behind each of which there was a toilet, a shower, or a sink. Essentially you had to pee in the middle of the hallway with your residence mates walking by. The urban legend was that the building was designed by an architect who mostly did prisons, so he forgot the bathrooms until the last minute, but it makes way more sense that it was these two designing it.
Ha, I think every college dorm has a myth about how it was based on a plan for a prison. Maybe my dorm should have had bathroom stalls in the hallways; people kept peeing in them either way.
Our dorm’s urban legend was that it had been an insane asylum.
did we go to the same school? Mine did, too!
Did yours have a mysterious blue mist that sometimes held students immobile in their beds?
This is my nightmare.
Wait, would there be any indication from the outside of whether any given door was a toilet, shower, or sink? Or was it just a terrible guessing game? I mean, I assume once you’d lived there for a few months you would learn which doors were which, but was the entire month of September like the worst imaginable round of Let’s Make A Deal?
I think the toilets and shower stalls were on one side and the sinks were on the other? It’s been a while. I definitely remember thinking it was inefficient to use the toilet on one side of the hallway and have to walk across to the other side to wash your hands. Also, the doors didn’t close automatically, so mostly they were open when no one was using them.
That’s not better! Except for people who don’t mind peeing in the shower.
#2: You know what the problem with this design is? It’s too easy to see what stalls are occupied.
#1: Is that a problem? I would have thought that would be good.
#2: No, that’s terrible. No one wants that. I know, we’ll set up the stall doors so that they swing closed on their own.
Best thing from moving to Australia, the little door locks say ‘vacant’ or ‘occupied’ on them! So when you lock the door, everyone knows you’re in there.
It revolutionized my life.
The amount of people that still hover uncertainly, like nervous dogs unwilling to test the ‘vacant’ sign, is distressingly high though.
ETA: I mean, they’re hovering like nervous dogs, unwilling to test the sign. Because dogs can’t read. Poor comma usage, my bad.
The mall near me put in new bathrooms with little indicators in the stall door locks, probably because they put in fancy stall doors that go nearly to the ground. Then later they replaced them with larger, actually readable indicators in the door locks. So that’s pretty awesome now.
(The first ones were obviously designed by someone who wasn’t in favour of letting people know when the stall was occupied, but who was being forced to put in an indicator anyways. They were tiny dots that changed from green to red when the door was locked and that were only visible from certain angles. The new ones very sensibly say “vacant” or “occupied.”)
The UK has this too. Do other countries not bother?
My college dorm freshman year was a suite with four double bedrooms, one single, and one bathroom with four sinks, two toilets and two showers. No doors. Just shower curtains to hang in front of the showers (acceptable) and the toilets (unacceptable).
The school didn’t even provide any of the shower curtains, so you had nine girls moving in and then one parent hurriedly running out to buy shower curtains the first time someone had to pee.
Disabled toilets are so much fun! The ones which have everything except space to turn the wheelchair around to get back out, for instance. Or the ones at the fairly new-built Royal Infirmary in Edinburgh, where the doors are far too heavy to push while also pushing a wheelchair. I would have got my partner to help, but since he is a bloke and the women’s disabled toilet was inside the women’s main toilet, we didn’t dare. I think I had to leave my wheelchair in the main toilet area, bags attached to it and everything.
In the Providence Place Mall a few years back, they had an ad campaign that put, at the bottom of every sign in the mall, the words “Defining You.” Usually, this meant it would go at the bottom of a random list of three stores, thus: “H&M, Build-A-Bear Workshop, Hot Topic – Defining You.” Except they literally put it on all their signs, even the ones pointing the way to the restrooms. Thus leading to the best or possibly worst bathroom sign ever, “Men’s and Women’s Restrooms: Defining You.”
I do spend a lot of time in there, TBH.
BD 1: What about the counter? Anything missing?
BD 2: Slightly titled. Imperceptibly so.
BD 1: How are we going to do that and why?
BD 2: We put the soap dispenser really far away from the bowl of the sink so the counter would always be wet, but being wet is not enough. We need the water to pool right at the edge so it drips on people’s crotches.
BD 1: Don’t people want dry crotches?
BD 2: Caring about what people want is not my prerogative.
you have uncovered a horrible truth.
relatedly, this leaves no dry space for large bags/purses/etc so you must wash hands while playing the awkward hold-it-with-your-semi-shrugged-shoulders purse strap dance
I’m short enough that I don’t get a wet crotch, but I do get a giant water line right across the middle of my stomach. More comfortable but no more attractive.
I would forgive all of this if bathroom designers would come up with some kind of mechanism that delivers an electric shock if you try to leave the stall when there’s still pee on the toilet seat.
I am always so confused (and horrified) by it. Do people somehow not notice that they’ve left urine all over the seat, or do they not care?
Could we work in an automatic flush so powerful that half the water in the bowl flies out and douses the seat, so either the next person to use it has to wonder if that’s water or pee, or you have to quickly grab a wad of toilet paper to wipe it up and try to duck out again before your motion sets off the flush again?
Or so powerful and ill-timed that it flies up while you’re still sitting there.
But now when you’ve actually stood up and are trying to make it flush.
BD 1: We have a men’s room with one toilet, one urinal, one sink, one soap dispenser, one towel dispenser and one locking door. We have a women’s room with one toilet, one sink, one soap dispenser, one towel dispenser, and one locking door. Perfect!
BD 2: Why make it a “men’s room” and a “women’s room”? Each room is completely private. Couldn’t they both just be unisex bathrooms?
BD 1: But the women’s room doesn’t have a urinal.
BD 2: A man can pee in a toilet. They do it at home, right?
BD 1: And a woman doesn’t want to use a urinal.
BD 2: She doesn’t have to– there’s also a toilet in there, right? She’d just be in the same room as a urinal, she wouldn’t be required to use it.
BD 1: I guess…
BD 2: Wouldn’t it make more sense? For completely private bathrooms to be unisex? So if there is a woman in the women’s restroom, and the men’s restroom is free, the woman wouldn’t feel socially obligated to wait pointlessly? And vice versa?
BD 1: That WOULD make sense. But… but… but… THE WORLD MUST BE GENDERED!
THIS KILLS ME because it means you get into really dumb situations where the mens (single) room is empty, and there’s a line of 5 for the women’s (single) room. WHY?
Apparently it’s old and stupid building codes or bylaws. I hate it.
My own small personal form of protest is just to use whichever single-occupancy bathroom happens to be open, even if there’s a line for the one that I’m supposed to use.
I’ve started saying, “I think we should just take over the men’s room” to the women in line.
If they ignore me, no big deal, I’ll just use the men’s room myself and save a bunch of time.
If they don’t, then hey, I’ve gotten a whole group of women to agree that the gender markings are arbitrary and stupid, *and* now the line will move more quickly.
win either way. 🙂
solidarity!
i’d say my use of gendered public bathrooms is 50/50 mens/womens. factor out restaurants and consider only club, bar, and music venues, that split is more like 75/25. i do not wait in lines for the ladies room unless absolutely necessary. it’s ridiculous.
I do that too! I have also gotten the stink eye if I happen to come out and a dude has been waiting for the “men’s” room for more than a nanosecond. It’s like, deal with it, duder.
There’s a restaurant in my neighborhood that has a “women’s” room and an “everyone” room and there is one guy who apparently lodges a complaint about how unfair that is every.single.time. he eats there and has loudly refused to use the facilities in the restaurant. If the servers all know you but it’s because you’re a colossal pain then I feel like that’s an essential failure at life.
Three words: Indigo Girls Concert.
Automated flush with the sensor up *really high*, so that you come in, sensor thinks “okay, person here”; you sit down on the toilet, sensor says “okay, person gone!” and FLUSH COMMENCES, spraying your butt with cold toilet water.
Maybe it works for people who are tall, like, really tall?
BD 1: Should all the stall door locks work?
BD 2: Nah. On some of them, the sliding mechanism should be slightly offset, so that you can’t push it in all the way, and have to stretch your arm all the way out to keep the door closed while you pee.
BD1: Yes, and the distance from the toilet to the door should be just farther than any normal person can reach.
has anyone been to the bathroom at the restaurant in the shard? It’s….reflective. Every surface a mirror. There is nowhere to look.
Good grief, yes. I’ve been thinking of that place ever since I started reading this thread. It’s not just the redoubled reflections, it’s the combo of that and the green neon lighting; you get a spectacular wraparound display of the aurora borealarse when you stand up to adjust your clothing.
In my first grown-up job, the offices were above a warehouse. The toilet was in the kitchen. With no divider between the toilet and what would be the food prep area if everyone wasn’t too disgusted to prep food there. I didn’t stay there long.
D:
I went to a bar over the weekend that had two toilets in a single room, no stall walls, just a little table between them. My boyfriend’s theory is that it was set up so you weren’t forced to interrupt your card game.
These are the monks, right?
My current workplace has toilets with an auto-flush on a sensor, and when the flush goes the toilet seat revolves around (originally for cleaning, but now broken, so just for fun?). I often hear screams from adjacent stalls. To calm down after all that excitement we then do tai-chi with the automatic soap/water/air thingys.
Sign in a movie theater bathroom, hung directly above the hot air dryer, which is placed over the sink:
“Do not place your popcorn here.”
While it’s hilarious to imagine the scenarios that led to that sign being necessary, WHY WOULDN’T YOU JUST PUT THE DRYER SOMEWHERE ELSE LIKE ABOVE THE TRASH CAN???
So one thing I found really weird about American bathrooms is that the stalls have no indicators that say “occupied” or “vacant”, or at least a little red dot when the door is locked to let you know someone is in there…I had my first baffling experience in Dallas airport where all the doors to the stalls closed automatically, but no indicators! I don’t understand how you’re supposed to know which one’s empty unless you look for feet under the doors, which seems very odd.
I HATE this. I have been in more than one bathroom where a line has formed for no reason because someone assumed all the stalls were occupied when they weren’t.
We also have a single-occupancy bathroom at work that has a shower in it. On the door, there is a sign that flips from “vacant” to “occupied”, but it is manual and you have to flip it yourself (e.g. it doesn’t change when you lock the door, unlike an airplane lavatory). So many people don’t bother to flip the sign, so if the door is closed you can’t always be 100% sure (and sometimes the door is open but says occupied, but that is a bit easier to suss out).
This is also why I hate when people close the door to unoccupied bathrooms in houses (esp when you have roommates). The way I know if it is available is by sticking my head out of my room; if the door is closed I assume it is occupied. I have held my bladder unnecessarily many times because of this.
Ooh yes, I hate it when people close toilet doors in their houses too! Also I totally get anxiety in people’s houses where the toilet door has no lock, especially at parties when you can’t keep track of who’s still in the room
Our friends keep closing the door to our guest bath when they leave it. I think it’s an attempt to keep smells contained, but none of them realize that (a) it’s down a short hallway away from the living area so nobody’s encountering those smells and (b) if the door’s shut, air doesn’t circulate and the smells stay trapped. I’m about ready to post a passive-aggressive sign on the wall.
I was guilty of forming an unnecessary line in Japan this January when one of the many restrooms with ceiling-to-floor cubicle walls and doors didn’t have an indicator on the door. I’d tried gently poking a couple of doors to see if the lock engaged, and because they had some sort of stiff latch, I thought they were locked.
Sorry, Japanese women in line behind me! I am socially awkward in multiple countries!
I might be a weirdo, but I actually LIKE when there is a single stall. My big bathroom anxiety is always that I am going to walk in on someone who forgot to lock the door (or that I will forget and they will walk in on me) so I really appreciate the extra door.
I take diruetics for my blood pressure, so I have to pee a lot, and am thus very familiar with where to find good public bathrooms. My big pet peeve is when an establishment has two single-occupancy restrooms and they are labeled “men” and “women”. It makes no sense! Just have two bathrooms, A and B, and people can form a single queue and use whichever one is open! (Plus, added bonus, safe space for trans and genderqueer folks!)
“So, we’re agreed on push-button flushes that are set into the wall?”
“That’s right. To add the finishing touch, let’s make the channels they’re in about the depth of a human finger! People will really have to work to push them all the way in.”
“How do you want to use the space in this room?”
“Let’s make the cubicles really deep, so there’s about a metre of empty space between the toilet and the door, and allocate a tiny narrow aisle in front of them for everything else. People will love not being able to queue because the people washing their hands are taking up all the space that’s left.”
All of the toilets at my university seem to be terrible, but in an exciting range of different ways.
There’s a bathroom in a cylindrical building at my university that has three round bathrooms (and two or three single-person bathrooms on each floor).
The one that is designated for female people has stalls that not only have inward-opening doors, but the stalls themselves are WEDGE SHAPED.
You have to literally back in over the toilet to get the door closed, and then step over the toilet AGAIN to get the door open and exit.
ALSO it has terrible lighting and the atmosphere of a slasher movie.
I will walk to a different building before using that bathroom whenever possible.
HOWEVER, there are ALSO several bathrooms that include an accessible stall that ALSO has a sink in the stall — which I’m thinking could be for both those who need an accessible toilet and those who want an extra bit of privacy (for any trans* students). So, that’s better than the horror movie bathroom by a lot.
The public toilets in the shopping area in Old City in Shanghai have timers. You put in some change to get the door to unlock, then you close and lock the door, and while you’re doing your naturals there’s a big red digital clock counting down from 3 minutes on the outside of the door. When it hits 0:00, the door unlocks automatically and (if I remember correctly) swings open.
Advantage: people waiting in line know approximately how much longer they’ll have to do the pee-pee dance.
Disadvantage: if you need longer than that, you’d best have a friend who can stand outside and block/close the door when it pops open again. (Although given the number of airports in China that have squat toilets in the form of a giant trough in a tiled room and nothing else, I’m not so sure it would bother anyone other than tourists to have the door fly open mid-business.)
One of my closing-procedure jobs at work is to check the toilets to make sure we aren’t about to lock anyone in.
Our toilets are those one-stall jobs, with a push-door to get into the room itself, where there’s a sink then a stall with a locking door, T-junction with the outer door so you’re not staring directly at the toilet itself. Men’s and women’s, exactly the same.
So I generally just push open the outer door of each, making sure there’s no one inside. If there is, and they’re at the sink, fine, I make awkward eye contact and tell them ‘we’re closing in a couple of minutes’. If the stall is locked, I back quietly out and then make a big deal of knocking on the outer door, calling in that we’re about to close.
This is almost always fine. Except for the two times (TWO) that I have pushed the outer door of the men’s open, seen the stall unlocked and wide open, and then heard (HEARD) a man in the stall itself. TWICE.
I just don’t know what to do when this happens. Do men not feel the need to lock their stall? Is man-business that much more casual because they usually have the option to pee publicly? Are they just sad single guys who spend too much time on their own at home with no one to please?
UGH.
Oh, the minds of the designer! 🙂 This is fun! I agree to have a full-length mirror 🙂
Ooh yes, I hate it when people close toilet doors in their houses too! Also I totally get anxiety in people's houses where the toilet door has no lock, especially at parties when you can't keep track of who's still in the room
do women actually get Escher bathrooms? I get the micro-unit men’s room with a urinal and a stall, but is the vaghaver version seriously “a bathroom not labeled single-occupancy but since urinals don’t really work here we just put in one stall and called it a day?”
come to that it’s kind of weird that non-stall sit-down toilets don’t seem to be a thing? I mean, as a society I get that we’re embarrassed about shitting, that’s a thing, don’t think it’s the worst thing, but the absolute worst consequence of having urinal-distance sit toilets would be that maybe somebody–
I’m thinking too hard about this at the wrong part of the day
We do not forgive.
We do not forget.
Your name is in the Annals for when the revolution comes.
My alma mater is currently moving to an area housing a former prison, asylum and poor house. There's only been like 4 murders there in the last 20 years – one victim being found in a secret tunnel. Can't wait to hear what urban legends they're going to come up with to beat the truth!
Bathroom designer 1: I know, let’s put the lights on a motion sensor.
BD 2: That’s a great idea, it’ll show we’re environmentally conscious and will save our client money. Where shall we put the sensors?
BD 1: Completely away from the stalls. It’s not like people might be sat there for a while.
There’s a restaurant in my city where the men’s room door opens inward, facing the urinals, instead of being hinged on the other side to block them, so anyone walking down the hall to the women’s room at the right time gets an eyeful of men’s butts as they do their business.
A couple decades ago I found myself at a bar somewhere in SF where A) the sole restroom was on the second floor of the building and B) in order to get to the one and only stall with a sit down toilet, one had to stand in a narrow hallway, in a really, really long line that went past an almost equally long line of urinals. One way in, one way out. There’s something about standing an hour in line getting splattered with other people’s piss and nearly run over by stall users vacating the premises that has this bonding effect between total strangers, you know?
Oh wait no there isn’t.
I remember going to the ohio state fair once and the bathrooms were "provided by Charmin" and so were covered by pictures of colorful bears and bear puns about using the restroom.
I was waiting for a toilet cubicle at university recently, and heard someone speaking on their phone while inside one. She then left the room without washing her hands, still on the phone. Why?
I think everyone who has ever worked in any customer-focused job (or really, any job with humans) knows that sign-blindness is humanity's most common trait
YES. The number of people who claim not to have realised that food wasn't allowed in the library (although, it's a library, so what did they expect?), despite the presence of signs. Infuriating.
Bathroom Designer #1 and #2 both seem to agree on this: They have to design men’s and women’s bathrooms with exactly the same number of stalls, even though the men also have urinals so more men can move through faster, and women logistically take longer than men to do their business. This is somehow gender equality, to have a line of 20 women outside their bathroom at Intermission, while the men breeze in and out like cars in the fast lane.