I'm reminded of a gym I frequent, with blasting music out on the weightroom floor. Of course it is pin-drop quiet in the toilet area. :/
The Office of the Future Will Still Have a Terrible Bathroom
51–60 of 63 posts
Re: The Office of the Future Will Still Have a Terrible Bathroom
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
Womens rooms have sanitary napkin dispensers etc. In the old sexist days only womens rooms had a baby changing table. There are also social issues, is a one stall / one urinal a single occupancy or not? Technically there's two holes. Also you'd be surprised architecturally how many are precisely arranged such that a strategically located adjacent closet could be sacrificed to double or triple the bathroom size at a l…
There's still no good reason for the labeling. Take Starbucks for example: two individual gendered bathrooms. When someone is taking a long time in one bathroom, invariably someone of the 'incorrect gender' will use the next available room, because there's a single line of people in a crowded space that all need to go and nobody cares who uses a single person water closet. And before anyone mentions cleanliness, my a…
Ok I volunteered at a parent-cooperative preschool. I cleaned the bathrooms. The girls' bathroom was shockingly worse than the boys'. A data point.
Re: The Office of the Future Will Still Have a Terrible Bathroom
#53Another tip: get rid of those stupid Dyson hand dryers. They're unsanitary and don't work.
Re: The Office of the Future Will Still Have a Terrible Bathroom
#54> it's unease around the gap between the door and the partition Why is this a thing in the US? I legitimately don't understand it. As to the article overall: This is an interesting topic that is rarely discussed. I often see embarrassed bathroom patrons utilise the disabled-accessible bathroom because it is it's own room (i.e. not stall-separate, wall-separate). I have no issue with gender neutral bathrooms, but from…
Building/fire codes are a big factor. When you have enclosed spaces with doors that shut tightly then a variety of regulations come into play, whereas with a loosely-fitting partition with a gap underneath they do not. If push came to shove you could kick most partitions and they would have enough flex to pop the door open, or you could crawl out on the floor.
Apart from that - the ability to see if the stall is occupied without tugging on the door and perhaps causing an awkward encounter, making it more difficult to smoke or shoot up stealthily, and just simple cost/ease of installation.
Re: The Office of the Future Will Still Have a Terrible Bathroom
#55I'm surprised to hear that people have found the bathroom going experience so suboptimal, but I can understand where they are coming from. The vertical gap between door and frame is sometimes more than a finger wide! Personally, I mostly find the situation funny. I figure I've heard/smelled/been adjacent to my colleagues going to the bathroom more than any other member of my family. There's also something humanizing…
The vertical gap issue has always been weird to me, but I don't understand the issue with going to the bathroom in general.
It's something that we all do. I would better understand it if only half the population were afflicted with this strange curse called the poops, while the rest of us had digestive systems that could convert all waste into urine. That's not how it is though.
Everybody poops. Within the next 48 hours, it is pretty much guaranteed that all of your coworkers (from the sheepish new hire to the disgruntled 15 year veteran) will release something foul from their back end. Males, females and everything in between included. Most of them will probably stink something awful.
Everybody poops. Let's end this strange taboo.
Re: The Office of the Future Will Still Have a Terrible Bathroom
#56> OSHA rules require that workplace bathrooms remain clean and dry and a mop can slide right under partitions. Well, that explains why so many public bathroom stalls in Europe are nice, private, fully-enclosed spaces and none in America are. Thanks, OSHA /s
Yeah - why on earth do you need the mop/partition regulation?
Surely you just clean the stall when its empty, and open the door?
Re: The Office of the Future Will Still Have a Terrible Bathroom
#57We have two (2) cubicles and two (2) urinals for probably 200 males. One cubicle currently has a broken seat and the other is frequently (at least once a week) blocked with toilet paper and filth (properly splattered all over, of course). It's the worst office bathroom situation I've ever encountered.
That is grossly out of code [0]. With only two urinals, there should be a minimum of six full toilets. Management should be alerted to the violation ASAP so that they can take immediate corrective action, followed up by a complaint to OSHA. [0] https://www.osha.gov/pls/oshaweb/owadisp.show_document?p_tab...
Sadly OSHA has no jurisdiction over the UK.
On the other hand, http://www.hse.gov.uk/contact/faqs/toilets.htm is the relevant document - which agrees that 2C+2U is too few.
Re: The Office of the Future Will Still Have a Terrible Bathroom
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
That is grossly out of code [0]. With only two urinals, there should be a minimum of six full toilets. Management should be alerted to the violation ASAP so that they can take immediate corrective action, followed up by a complaint to OSHA. [0] https://www.osha.gov/pls/oshaweb/owadisp.show_document?p_tab...
Our office has the same issue. The problem is, the code only talks about number of employees but not proportional allocation between genders. It's possible that they have 200 men but less than 230 employees. This means they need 8 waterclosets, but naturally the builders made 4 for women and 4 for men. It's up to code, but don't expect to always be able to use the bathroom at work.
The table is per sex. So, if you have 100 females, you need at least 5 water closets available to females.
Re: The Office of the Future Will Still Have a Terrible Bathroom
#59Everything about the stall door was irrelevant. They are made so cheap and with such gaps because, they are cheaper that way. They won't go down to the floor because, that would be 12" more material cost. They won't ever fit closely because, they sag and bend because they're cheaply installed. All the blather about how they could be different is ignoring the cost factor, which would be large. ON a different note, I v…
I never understood when a place has two single occupancy bathrooms with one marked Men and the other Women. Maybe there's a law that requires this in some places or are they just catering to social expectations?
I came across a good summary of these requirements a while back. Unfortunately, I can can't find it now, but I can say there are definitely laws regarding this in the US, but they vary by jurisdiction. Some jurisdictions require 2 single-occupancy bathrooms to be labeled gendered, while some other jurisdictions require 2 single-occupancy bathrooms to be unisex.
P.S.: While not what I was looking for, I was able to find this Reason article that talks about the issue: http://reason.com/archives/2014/04/11/gender-neutral-bathroo...
Re: The Office of the Future Will Still Have a Terrible Bathroom
#60Another tip: get rid of those stupid Dyson hand dryers. They're unsanitary and don't work.
hate those so much.