Got severely chastised by a couple of my friends last night for not taking full advantage of the toileting opportunities offered on my trip to Japan recently. Well, when I say severely chastised I am of course exaggerating, and it was in the order of a gentle chiding, but I was still left in no doubt that I’d made a grave error of judgement with my minimalist approach. Apparently the advantages of the electronic toilet setup extends beyond a warm seat, a bidet function, and precisely aimed jets of air. There is a button you can push that will make a flushing noise if you’re anticipating making any noises yourself that might be indicative of embarrassing bowel activity. Such a feature might render superfluous the “poo loo” that is so highly desired in the workplace setting.
Speaking of which, how come building designers can get toilets so badly wrong so very often? One of my colleagues has a story of a changing room in a hospital in the NHS that has a single toilet cubicle in the middle of the room, the sort with only four feet of flimsy cabinetry that starts at mid calf height. I bet they use the fact that no one ever uses that toilet as evidence that no more toilets are needed.
Our current department is only a couple of years old, as we got shunted up to the tenth floor in a complex three way decanting arrangement to enable other parts of the hospital to have their shoddy leaking plumbing replaced. You’d think that in that situation we’d have a good chance to get things right, being in at the very beginning of the design process. But you’d be wrong. Our women’s toilets are bad enough, with none giving more than the rudiments of privacy. The mens are apparently worse, with a urinal right inside the door, leaving you and your penis exposed to all comers. I asked my friends if they thought urinals might become a thing of the past for society in general, but they assure me this will never happen. There’s some sort of male bonding that goes on when standing up next to each other to urinate that just can’t be replaced. It’s a mystery to me. In the womens, it’s weird to carry on a conversation if even just one of you is weeing.