Tag Archive for 'toilets'

Badly designed loos

Here’s a post the world’s been waiting for. A list of inconveniently designed public toilets (for men). Enjoy!

  • Toilets where, when the door is opened, people can peer in and actually see me using the urinal: Now, I know it’s not a big deal, but when I’m taking a piss, I don’t want to have people watching me. Doesn’t matter whether they “can’t see anything”. Being watched during this most pressing of matters is not on top of my list of favourites.
  • Toilets that are so small, you can’t actually stand at the urinal without being constantly kicked in the ass by either a door or someone trying to get past you: That doesn’t need a whole lot of explanation, it just doesn’t feel right.
  • Toilets where urinals are too close to each other: Let me tell you, there actually is something called “peeing shyness”. Put me in between two occupied urinals, and I’m pretty sure it’ll take ages for things to flow freely. So please, for the sake of toilet-visit brevity, mind those gaps! Or put urinals in stalls altogether.
  • Toilets without working ventilation: Which really should be a no-brainer, but unbelievably enough, there are just too many toilets without it. Having to routinely visit a place that smells of death and decay is, and independent studies have hammered this point home time and time again, life-shortening.*

For more on smell and death and decay and toilets, read this entry from a while back. It’s good fun, I swear!

And if you’ve got something to say about inconvenient toilets, why not leave a comment? I’d be delighted!

*You might not believe me about those studies, but I assure you, they do exist. And I’m not making that up.

No water, no smell – not quite

Sometime during the summer, the university installed so-called waterless urinals. I’ve read up on these things, and in theory, waterless urinals seem a really good choice. Here’s a quote from something I found in the vast plains of the Interweb:

[...] there appear to be three primary advantages of the waterless urinal: water savings; reduced maintenance; and improved hygiene.

Now, I’m all for water savings, reduced maintenance and improved hygiene. Too bad it doesn’t work that way. Ever since these things have been introduced, the restrooms smell even worse than they did before. Which leaves us in a bad place, considering that they smelled like a wet, dead cat before. So what went wrong? According to manufacturers, bacteria need moist environments to do their thing, and since these urinals always dry out, there’s no place for them to sit. Ergo, no smell. Well, there is smell, and my educated guess is, that someone at the administration level at the university thought that waterless urinals are the best, because you don’t need any water, and since you don’t need any water you can actually totally forget about them and don’t have to make maintenance people go in there and fix them if they don’t actually do what they were promised to do, which is NOT SMELL LIKE DEATH!

It’s not surprising that just above the urinals, someone scribbled this Shiningesque message of despair. Murder indeed.




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