Category — Reader Mail

Joe writes:

I don’t get the stall hatred. I just don’t see any shame in it. So what if someone shoe checks you out for a stander? As long as you don’t shut and lock the door you’re fine. That shows that you respect a brother’s privacy, but you take it casual enough to treat the stall as a de facto urinal, with no extra effort. It may be environmentally incorrect, but it’s how the world works. The only trouble you might encounter is if someone isn’t looking out an walks in, but that’s on his shoulders.

I’ve got to admit, Joe’s got me a little confused here. Stall hatred? That sure doesn’t sound like us, in fact we advise heading for the stall on many different occasions. In fact, we’ve even advocated the shoe check before.

I don’t get Joe.

You may have seen this image floating around in an email titled Contractor of the Year Nominees. It’s the kind of thing that sends chills down our spines (or occasionally icy fear into our hearts) here at the ICBE – disaster urinals.

What exactly was the person that designed this bathroom thinking? Were they 1 short of their urinal installation quota for the month? Do they simply not know how urinals work? Are they the evil arch-nemesis of the ICBE?

Thanks to Vfor the pic

I recently had the pleasure of going aboard the USS Midway (Wikipedia), an aircraft carrier currently serving as a museum ship in San Diego. Aside from being a generally super-cool museum, the Midway contains something that you will not be surprised was of interest to me: bathrooms.

I managed to capture this picture of what I believe to be the bathroom for some junior officers – please don’t mind the “artistic” angle, I had to reach over and around a sheet of plexiglass to make the shot. Overall, some fairly nice facilities for a boat not designed with luxury in mind.

Fantastic ICBE reader Andy went one step further, procuring two shots of the bathroom in the Midway’s brig.

Click for larger

Click for larger

While I certainly expected a step down in the accommodations, I didn’t expect you’d have to actually stand in the toilet to use the sink. Ouch!

A colleague of mine used a urinal the other day. Nothing unusual about that. In the midst of his business, a second person took the adjacent urinal – it’s okay though, there’s a significant partition between the two.

At which point the second person began to speak quietly:

It’s hard. It’s hard. It’s hard.

As you can imagine, my colleague was a little distressed by the fact that a man mere inches away from him had his package in hand and was pontificating about its relative stiffness. Until, out of the corner of his eye, my colleague caught a glimpse of the headphones. This, in fact, is what he really heard:

And it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard, and it’s a hard.

In this day of iPod all-pervasiveness, we must take care to listen to songs appropriate to the present circumstances. That includes not listening to A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall at the urinal.

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!

We here at the ICBE love dual-flush toilets. First brought to our attention by the land down under, the general concept is as follows. Your toilet has two buttons, one for a regular flush, and one for a light flush that uses less water. Think of it as one button for pee and another for poo if you will. It makes a lot of sense, since the standard flush is major overkill for a bit of pee, and saves a ton of water over time.

Sure you could always let the yellow mellow, but that doesn’t go over well with everyone. I’ve always wondered why dual-flush toilets weren’t mainstream in North America, but now I have a report that they are – at least in Canada. Esteemed reader Holly writes the following:

We here in Canada have quite a few of the two-button devices detailed in the Australian section.

Really? I’ve spent 21 years of my life in Canada, and have travelled there numerous times since relocating to the USA, and have never once seem a dual-flush toilet. Unfortunately my reply to Holly was ignored so I was unable to get any more specific information.

Any Canadian readers out there with stories of dual-flush toilets, proof or maybe pictures?

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.

VooDoo Child writes the following:

“There have been studies done which show that the most efficient thing to do is simply to leave the seat in whatever position it was when you finished up.” (from Bathroom Etiquette at Home)

The above statement is actually true proper etiquette for today’s time. It is not the man’s responsibility to make sure the seat is down for a woman… any more than it is the responsibility of a woman to put the seat back up when she finishes. It is 2009 and nobody gets a free pass just because of gender.

Hmmm. Regardless of the year (this email was received while it was still 2009), I hardly consider leaving the seat down a free pass for women. Women already have a hard enough time going to the bathroom what with the whole “can’t pee standing up without some effort or third party appliances” thing, and if leaving the seat down makes it easier for them, while I think that’s the right thing to do. Etiquette is all about being aware of others.

But you are correct – it’s not the man’s responsibility to put the seat down, it’s simply good etiquette to put the seat down. People always confuse etiquette, laws, rules and responsibility.

VooDoo Child continues:

SIDE NOTE: The same holds true for birth control. It is not the man’s responsibility – because he cannot get pregnant. (Of course, if he fails to protect himself, he could end up with 18 years of child support payments, not to mention an STD – but I digress). A woman should hold complete responsibility for birth control. Please consider the following: If it happened that a man’s testicles grew to the size of watermelons, plus he experienced several months of daily nausea, and then was saddled with a lifelong commitment to another human being (or had to make the difficult decision to kill it) – just because he didn’t consider birth control before having sex, I ASSURE you that 99.9 percent of men would take every precaution to keep that from happening, and would NEVER expect a woman to protect him from that.

Whoa. Sex and pregnancy have NOTHING to do with etiquette. Both women and men need to do whatever they can to avoid unwanted pregnancies and STDs. It’s ridiculous to compare toilet seat position and sex/pregnancy.

Still more from VooDoo Child:

Now, I’m certain you will not correct your page, because that etiquette rule was simply your opinion as a woman. However, if there were a non-gendered judging party who was completely impartial and unbiased…. I feel certain they would agree with me whole-heartedly.

As for your site in general though, I like it. Keep up the good work.

Curious – this is the first time I’ve been mistaken for being a woman. I assure you I am a man, and my thoughts on toilet seat etiquette are anything but selfish. Oh, and thanks!

There are loos, and then there are ultimate loos. Gisborne sends us the following shot of a toilet near Heather Lake, in Sequoia National Park. This my readers, is an ultimate loo!

And in case you are wondering, the sign is warning users not to throw any trash in the toilet.