Porcelain

The main guideline behind urinal selection is the MPPNBA:

Maximum People Peeing Not Beside Anyone

Catchy, isn’t it? What this means is that for any given bathroom configuration, you want to select urinals so that you can have the highest total occupancy (ie number of guys peeing), all the while ensuring that no two adjacent urinals are occupied.

Shawn provides us with this wonderful diagram of a bank of 7 urinals as the perfect example of the MPPNBA in action:

Say the outer two urinals are occupied. The temptation might be to take the central urinal (#4), but this means that urinals 2, 3, 5 and 6 are now off limits and only 3 men can pee at once. Selecting urinal 3 or 5 leaves the other open, and allows for a total of 4 men to pee simultaneously in comfort, rather than only 3. This is the MPPNBA - 4 men peeing at once, nobody beside anybody else.

?! Anybody have any idea where this was taken?

S. writes the following:

I’m a senior in high school and in a few weeks, I’m going on a class trip to XXXXX where I’ll be staying in a hotel room with a few other girls whom I don’t know very well. During the four day, three night trip, I’m going to need to use the bathroom, and I’m wondering how I should go about this, especially since I find it impossible to go #2 anywhere besides my own home - even friends’ houses. Even when I pee I have to run the water in the sink to cover the noise. I’ve considered the option of holding it until I need to take a shower, then start running the shower while going #2. That way, I have an excuse to use the fan, and by the time I get out, the smell should be gone. Also, that option would require that I flush the toilet while the others think I’m in the shower, which could lead to awkward questions. Another option would be finding another bathroom in the hotel or a restaurant where other girls wouldn’t want to follow me to the bathroom. If anyone has ideas or suggestions, they would be greatly appreciated.

Sorry to hear that you aren’t looking forward to your class trip as much as you could be. Don’t worry though, you aren’t the only one who’s not completely comfortable going to the bathroom outside the home. However since you’ll be gone a few days, you’re going to have to find a way to do it!

I think your last idea was the best - find a bathroom in the hotel lobby where you can have some peace and quiet away from your friends. It turns out that most hotels do have public bathrooms available in the lobby, and by and large they are unoccupied since most people just use the ones in their room.

Trying to sync up showers and #2 just seems like a real hassle, and way more effort than it’s worth.

A distressed reader recently sent the following email:

After searching your website, I was disappointed to find nothing on the topic of (I hate to even say it!) public Family Restrooms. These have been springing up in local department stores and malls recently. One only has to pass near the restroom area to find the signs emblazoned on the wall.

What on earth is a Family Restroom and what in the world can be going on in there?

To be honest, I haven’t seen a whole ton of these in my recent excursions. However, I’m fairly certain that the Family Restroom is a place where families with small children can go to take care of business like diaper changing, and perhaps even breastfeeding. There isn’t anything sinister about these places, and given the state of changing tables in regular bathrooms (crappy), I’d say they are a welcome addition to the public bathroom landscape.

Also, is there any real medical terminology to describe bathroom phobia (other than parauresis). I ask because every time I see the Family Bathroom sign, it causes me to have heart palpitations, minor sweating and a hurried gait.

Paruresis (for more information check out the link to the International Paruresis Association in the sidebar) relates more with an inability to go to the bathroom, rather than a direct fear of the bathroom itself. It doesn’t appear, based on me Googling for 5 minutes, that a bathroom phobia has any specific name. You simply have a bathroom phobia.

On another unrelated (I think) note, when I was quite young, the railway station in Kansas City featured toilets with spring-loaded seats that retracted upward toward the water tank. There was a horseshoe shaped depression in the face of the tank which was the very mate of the seat. When one had to use the toilet, it required pulling down the heavy tensioned seat. When one stood up, the seat rose quickly to fit in said depression, causing an eerie black light to appear haloed around and behind it.

When one is very, very young, but just beyond requiring assistance with bathroom duties, such an apparatus is both fascinating and terrifying. Fear of being snapped up or of being “burnt” by the strange blue light was all too real. Furthermore, one had to deposit a dime in a slot on the stall door in order to witness this technological wonder of the day. I’m sure I have some mental scarring in relation to using those toilets which may be related to my new fear of Family Restrooms.

Can you help?

Yikes! Well from the sound of things I’d have to agree, these train bathrooms may well have contributed to your current bathroom phobia. I’ve never heard of or seen such a thing, and am especially glad I never came across one when I was a child.

I wish I could help you conquer your fears, but I’m afraid that is beyond the scope of my abilities. It may be time to seek out the help of a mental health professional. Good luck!

This isn’t exactly bathroom related, and I am not attempting to make light of what is obviously a very serious situation, but did they really need to rip off the ICBE’s logo?

vs.

Okay, not quite. The entire Stanford University campus hasn’t gone dual-flush, but a single building has: The Environment and Energy Building, amongst a host of other environmentally friendly moves, has installed dual-flush toilets in its bathrooms. What does that mean exactly? Little flushes for pee, and big flushes for poo.

In theory this should be most useful in the women’s bathrooms, since men should be using urinals for most of their peeing, but we all end up taking a pee in a stall from time to time.

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I recently received an email about a curious situation. A new bride was a little upset because her mother-in-law insists on leaving the door open when she pees.

Now there’s nothing really wrong with leaving the door open at home when you pee, if nobody else minds. Thing is, people usually mind, so unless you know for a fact that people are okay with it (say it’s just you and a spouse), you’re best off just keeping that door closed.

This is pretty sweet. A gallery of 59 of some of the coolest international toilet signs you’ll ever see. Most of them did a pretty good job of conveying the differences between men and women, even if a little subtle at times. This is one of my (many) favorites - notice the bow in the lady’s hair!

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If you thought peeing at the Sofitel Queenstown was weird… this is going to blow your mind. The Sao Joao da Madeira shopping center in the Northern part of Portugal has a bathroom decorated with female mannequins who lurk eerily behind the urinals. No word on if there’s better privacy from the mannequins in the stalls, but at least they have urinal partitions!

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PS: Does anybody have any more information on this place?

Patricia writes the following:

We have an unusual situation. My hope is that you can give me guidance on how to resolve it. Our firm is a multi-cultural environment. In multiple men’s bathrooms, a group of men are defecating into paper towels wadding up the paper towels and putting it on the toilet back for the facilities staff to dispose of. Have you heard of this phenomena before and do you have any recommendations.

Yikes - that’s a tough one. I’ve never heard of such behavior, and haven’t a clue as to which cultures this might be common practice in. It’s clear that some kind of educational program needs to be established, but exactly what? Perhaps a small poster above the toilet indicating the proper usage of the device would be appropriate, kind of like Americans might see above a complicated Japanese toilet. Either way, good luck!

mhh5th was kind enough to send along a link to a toilet paper related story, but I’m so annoyed by it I an hardly bring myself to write. Let’s see here…

1) There are people out there who call themselves memeticists.

2) Apparently some people are stupid enough to believe that humans only spread memes which are useful or interesting.

3) This was all in a talk at TED, which is inherently annoying in and of itself.

4) Magnus Lindkvist (read the first comment).

Anyways, somewhere in there is something about how maids in hotels fold the toilet paper.

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By all accounts (none of which I can be bothered to dig up and link to here), Microsoft’s Vista operating system is a big pile of crap. Now that we’ve got the obligatory pun out of the way, check this out - toilet paper with the features of Vista’s first service pack (SP1) printed right on it! Yes, you would be correct in assuming that the exclamation point there is a little bit forced. Seems like nothing more than to put more dyes into Japanese sewer systems…

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Here at the ICBE we usually consider bathroom stall doors to be a good thing. After a recent incident however, it appears as if Darren Fletcher, a player for Manchester United, might not be in agreement. Seems he was just minding his own business when a stall door fell on his head, bloodying him up and knocking him unconscious.

Unconscious? According to his wikipedia page, Fletcher stands just over 6 feet tall. Most bathroom stall doors don’t even reach that high, so what I want to know is, if he wasn’t actually taking a poop at the time (and it doesn’t sound like he was), is how did this door even hit his head, much less with the required velocity to knock him out?

I call shenanigans…

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PS: While doing a Google image search for Fletcher, I came across this goal diagram at the BBC of Fletcher scoring a goal in during Euro 2004 that was simply too awesome not to post…

Remember that scene in Lethal Weapon? No, not that one - the one where Danny Glover’s character is stuck on the toilet for a few days because there’s a bomb rigged to go off as soon as he gets up. Anyways, if you think he spent a long time on the can, can you imagine how a woman felt after sitting on the toilet for two straight years?

Details are pretty limited on the story, but it appears as if the woman’s skin had actually grown around the seat, which needed to be removed and transported with her to the hospital.

Ugh.

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Got an old Mac lying around? You know, one of those classic, all-in-one designs? Do what this guy did, and turn it into the geekiest (and quite possibly largest) toilet paper dispenser possible!

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