Category — Etiquette & Bathroom Fun

As you most certainly already know, Canada won the olympic gold medal for men’s hockey this year. Reports are that 80% of Canadians tuned into at least part of the game, making for a whole lot of people going pee all the same time.

Luckily, EPCOR was kind enough to produce a graph of water usage over the course of the day. Check out the spikes during intermission!

Apparently 1 in 3 Americans tuned in as well, but no graphs of their flushing habits.

via Pat’s Papers and BDS

Previously: Halftime flushing and the Superbowl

It’s been years since I have used truly awful toilet paper.

A couple of decades ago, when I frequented the public ice arenas of Edmonton, Alberta, I did a lot of necessity-based toilet paper exploration. There was some terrible stuff out there back then. The worst was the TP that was dispensed a single square at a time, and consisted, from what I could tell, of a very fine grain sand paper.

Recently though, my exploration has diminished, and even when I strike out for a public bathroom I’m rarely treated to anything less than perfectly adequate loo roll.

Now for all my experimentation back in the day, never once did I end up hospitalized with a wiping-related ailment, like certain toilet paper manufacturers would have had you believe in the 1920s. That’s right, back long before the internet was even a twinkle in anybody’s eye, scare tactics were being employed to convince people to drop premium cash for premium TP.

When you ask for just “toilet paper,” danger is probably the last thing that enters your mind.

Correct! But wait, it goes on!

You are risking your family’s health every time you do this.

AUGH!!!! My family!!!

via BoingBoing

Here at the ICBE we get a lot of email from people who seem to have missed the concept of the site entirely and want us to enter into a wholesaler agreement to sell bathroom fixtures. So it’s a real treat to get an email about a product that’s actually relevant to bathroom etiquette.

As you probably know, the ICBE’s official position is that the toilet seat should be left down. The one thing about this is that, especially in mixed male/female environments, this involves a lot of raising/lowering the toilet seat.

Enter the Johnie-Lift, a small handle that attaches to the seat to minimize actual contact with the (hopefully not too) germ-laden surface. Paul writes the following:

The discussion on whether to leave the toilet seat or down wages on, however I believe in leaving it down. My wife has me well trained and it makes sense to me anyway.

Back in 1963, my In-Laws made a small handle for the toilet and won approval from Sears & Roebuck to carry it, but they did not have the resources to make the injection mold.

Now, after some 46 years, my wife resurected the product, including upgrading the look to be decorative in order to blend in with today’s bathrooms. We used the same name that my In-Laws came up with way back.

Our product is the Johnie-Lift – a decorative toilet seat handle that installs instantly and provides a more sanitary way to raise and lower the seat, eliminating any direct contact. While this a small step in the overall germ prevention program, combined with other simple ideas will make a big difference. It may also reduce the incidence of arguments.

We are a small, family-owned company located in Thousand Oaks, California and we need help in getting our message out. Please let me know if you could help us.

Well, I’m not really sure about the marketing power of the ICBE, but we’re happy to try. Head on over to the Johnie-Lift site to check them out, and order a few. At $2.95 a pop they are nothing if not reasonably priced.

We talk about seat position a lot here at the ICBE. As we say on our dedicated page on the matter, proper etiquette dictates that the seat be left down, with a couple exceptions. Here’s an important passage from that page that bears repeating:

…this isn’t about logic, or statistics, or minimizing global effort or anything other than etiquette and doing what’s right.

So when reader Michael D. emailed me a link to a statistical analysis of toilet seat positions and efficiency, I wasn’t that impressed. From the paper, by Jay Pil Choi:

I find that the “down rule” is inefficient unless there is a large degree of asymmetry in the inconvenience costs of shifting the position of the toilet seat across genders. I show that the “selfish” or the “status quo” rule that leaves the toilet seat in the position used dominates the down rule in a wide range of parameter spaces including the case where the inconvenience costs are the same.

Let me repeat: This isn’t about efficiency. This is about etiquette!

It’s not often that bathroom etiquette reaches the mainstream of pop culture, but when it does you can bet we love it. I am of course talking about last week’s episode of The Office. Yes, we’re a little behind.

If you haven’t seen the episod yet yourself (do you live in a cave?), the story goes something like this:

1) Jim and Pam visit a potential daycare

2) Jim walks in on the daycare director sitting on the toilet

3) Hilarity ensues, including a very awkward confrontation about the incident.

#3 is where it all went wrong. If you walk in on somebody going to the bathroom, leave immediately and apologize as you do so. Don’t apologize and then leave, apologize while you are already leaving. And for goodness sake, look down while you do so.

Now if somebody walks in on you, you have to apologize too. Oh, and try not to scream – that doesn’t help anybody (unless of course it’s a prowler).

It doesn’t matter who’s fault it is, both people simply need to do a quick apology and never, ever talk about it again.

Let me repeat myself: Stall doors are for closing.

Okay, have I made that clear enough? Now I think most people understand that if they use a stall to sit down for a #1 or #2, they should close the door. But what is apparently not obvious is that the same rule applies even if you are doing a standing pee.

The problem isn’t one of exposure. Standing to pee inside a stall with the door open exposes you less than peeing at the typical urinal. The problem is when the door is slightly ajar – open enough for somebody to think the stall is empty, but closed enough to shield you from view. The result is somebody believing the stall is empty, attempting to access it and either simply creating an awkward situation or slamming the door right into the person peeing.

Either way, it’s a bad idea. Be glad you have a door on that stall, and close it!

It’s tough times at the Toronto Sun these days. No, I’m not talking financially (though newspapers aren’t exactly having a good time of that either), I’m talking about going to the bathroom. See, for the longest time, staffers at the sun have been free to hunt for an open bathroom in any of 6 floors in their building. Now, reorganization and renovation are cramming all those people onto one floor.

Let me do the math for you, that’s 1/6th, or about 17% of the bathrooms they had before. Ouch.

I spoke to columnist Mike Strobel about the situation and he was understandably concerned.

There are guys I’ve worked with for 30 years — and never once seen them enter or leave a men’s room stall.

All I can say is good luck!

Read the full column, with my remarks

I received a rather disturbing email from Ash recently:

I’d like to request an update to http://www.icbe.org/workplace-bathroom-etiquette/.

At my place of work we constantly have problems with people peeing on the toilet seat, which can make doing number #2 an unnecessarily unpleasant experience. Could you please add a section on putting the seat up if you have to pee standing up in the bowl ? I’m considering printing off the points on this page and putting them up, so if you could update the page it would be awesome!

It’s disturbing because wiping your pee off the seat (or just plain not peeing on the seat in the first place) seems like such a fundamental rule of bathroom etiquette and general good behavior that people wouldn’t need to be reminded of it. It just goes to show that there is no depth to which people will not sink when it comes to bad bathroom etiquette. I have updated the page, but let me say it here as well:

Being out of the house does not give you license to be a slob. Just because you are at work, or in a random public restroom, it is not okay to pee on the seat, or on the floor, or not flush, or any other gross thing you might consider doing.

My (almost) three year old has a hard time understanding why he shouldn’t eat and/or drink while on the toilet. This girl however is old enough not to have any excuses. If you didn’t already know, food and the toilet don’t go together. Not only is it bad etiquette, it’s just plain gross!

From TotallyCrap.com’s Halloween baby gallery (NSFW!)

In case you were living in a cave, CES was last week, which means a whole bunch of geeks went to Vegas to look at gadgets. And, according to the fine reporters at Gizmodo, at least one of them relieved himself on the show floor.

In case you were wondering – that’s some bad etiquette. Gross!