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Tonight I decided to have some fun and make a short educational video about personal space and urinal etiquette. As you will see for yourself, while the video quality isn’t superb the content is rather fantastic.

Watch the video on YouTube

One of the wonderful things about having children is throwing all of your rules of bathroom etiquette out the window. Take talking in the bathroom for instance. When you enter a public bathroom with a 4 year old, it’s all “don’t touch the toilet” and “wash your hands” and “please pull your pants up“, words that simply should never be uttered in strictly adult company.

Well the other day ICBE Jr and I were dining at a restaurant when I accompanied him to the bathroom. It was the standard set of 3 urinals, and he took the kiddie-sized one on the left.

I went ahead and took the middle urinal.

*gasp*

I’m going to go ahead and repeat myself here – I took the middle urinal. Now on the one hand that was a grievous breach of bathroom etiquette. On the other hand, what I didn’t want to happen was to take the urinal on the right, and then have a third party enter and occupy a urinal between me and ICBE Jr. Much like in politics, etiquette is often about the lesser of evils.

My most formative memories of my childhood all involve the bathroom. One time, during intermission at a hockey game, I was faced with two tasks:

1. Get food from the concession
2. Go to the bathroom

In my current wisdom and experience I know that there is right and a wrong order in which to perform these tasks, but at the time I wasn’t so knowledgeable. So I got my food. Then I took my food into the bathroom with me – as I recall it was a hamburger wrapped in a foil sack which I placed in my pocket – and went pee.

My parents spotted me after I did my business, and made the connection that I had just strolled into a public bathroom with food. They were less than impressed, and I hadn’t even taken my burger out of its wrapper.

Food and bathrooms don’t mix. It’s not just the ick factor either, with all the flushing that goes on germ-laden droplets are constantly quite literally whizzing (ha!) through the air. So I was more than a little disturbed to hear the following tale over at Eatocracy:

The intern with the shaved head was on her phone in the bathroom again. She seemed to regard the third floor ladies room at our office as her personal rec room which was…fine, if somewhat unnervingly intimate on occasion. I realized, though, that I’d severely, thoroughly, grossly underestimated her level of one-ness with these particular environment on the day several years ago when I saw her emerge from a stall, eating cereal. From a bowl. With milk.

Yuck! It’s not just wrapped food. It’s food that’s open to the disgusting environment of the public bathroom. And it’s not just open food, it’s open food that’s actively being consumed.

Eating is the opposite of what bathrooms are for. Don’t eat in the bathroom.

Read the full story at Eatocracy, including a few other tales of gross places to eat.

via J

The Roskilde Festival in Denmark used to have a little bit of a problem with people peeing on the sides of trees.

Now they simply have the P-Tree:

If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. Or at the very least provide them with some urinals, and improve the situation for everyone. No word on what the full-bladdered female is supposed to do…

via Metafilter

One of the subjects that is coming up more and more is that of accompanying children in public bathrooms. When a mother accompanies her daughter, or when a father accompanies his son it’s pretty straightforward, but when it’s mother/son or father/daughter things becomes a little more complicated. The main rule when taking your opposite-gendered child to the bathroom is this:

You go to your bathroom, no theirs. Fathers take daughters to the men’s bathroom, mother’s take sons to the women’s bathroom.

The tricky question is how old does a child need to be for this practice to become inappropriate? Though honestly that’s not the real question, the real question is how old does a child need to be before they can safely be allowed to go to a public bathroom alone? Because as a parent myself I can assure you that safety will win out over impropriety every time.

That’s a question that I don’t intend to answer right now, and is going to vary from child to child, parent to parent and situation to situation (not all public bathrooms are created equally). What I will say is that I’m a big fan of family bathrooms and one person bathrooms which eliminate these problems and concerns.

Now alert reader Roger recently asked a related and very important question:

What is the proper thing to do when you enter a public restroom, a man is at the wash basins with a young daughter, and the urinals are close by. Do you step up to the urinal or wait until they leave? This has happened to me several times.

That’s a tricky one. When the man and his daughter entered the bathroom, there could have been men at the urinal. When they exited the stall (presumably the father and/or daughter went pee in a stall in this case) there could have been men at the urinal. So while possibly a little uncomfortable, there is certainly precedence for men to use the urinals while the daughter is present. But should you start to use the urinals while the daughter is at the sink, especially if the sink is close by?

In general the answer is no. There are obvious exceptions, like the urinals and sinks being in virtually separate rooms, but as a general rule if there is a female child using the sinks in the men’s room, and the urinals are close by, you should wait. The time spent at the sinks is almost always very short, so in this case it’s best just to play it safe and bide your time until the father and daughter have finished up and left.

Annoyed reader John writes the following:

I’m not going to be hateful here. But just what are you really afraid of? That’s what does etiquette thing is really all about. What’s bad or horrible thing will happen to you in that brief 60 seconds of your day standing next to someone else? Seriously of all the challenging things in life, is this really one of them? Put some genuine thought into that.

Obviously everybody is more than welcome to our own thoughts and opinions on bathroom etiquette, but to suggest that I, the President of the International Center for Bathroom Etiquette hasn’t put some “genuine thought into that” is, well, rather silly. My job here at the ICBE consists of pretty much nothing but thinking about bathroom etiquette, and let me assure you I am good at my job.

So the answers to your questions John:

Q: What are you really afraid of?
A: Nothing, it’s just nice to have some proper behavior in the bathroom.

Q: What bad or horrible thing will happen?
A: Nothing, it’s just nice to not have to pee right beside somebody else.

Q: Is this really a challenging thing in life?
A: Heck no!

Here’s something for you to put some thought into John: Bathroom etiquette isn’t about you, it’s about everybody else that you encounter in the bathroom. It’s about taking their feelings into consideration, and adjusting your behavior to make other people happy, not just yourself.

When you start talking about developing nations, access to clean water and reliable energy are two major problems. The Loowatt takes a crack at both of these problems at once by providing a toilet that converts human waste into natural gas and fertilizer. It doesn’t waste water, it creates fuel, and it takes care of processing human waste – what’s not to love?

The hideous, hideous looks.

Now it’s not clear if every Loowatt is going to look like this (the pictures on the site suggest not), and I understand it is made from human feces, but does it really have to look like a gigantic cylindrical poop? Yuck!

Loowatt Page
More pics of the toilet over at Inhabitat
via mhh5th

It’s a banner week for loo roll dresses here at the ICBE. First it was Pippa Middleton, resplendent in TP and now it’s the lovely Posh Spice, all decked out in loo roll for her baby shower:

Looking good Mrs. Beckham!

Read at I’m Not Obsessed (via MoeJackson.com)

Any excuse to post an article using the term loo roll! Here’s Pippa Middleton, sister of Kate “Duchess of Cambridge” Middleton, on the left at the royal wedding and on the right sporting a loo roll dress during lighter times:

Hate to say it but they did a pretty nice job with that dress!

From the Daily Mail

According to a recent Google survey, 39% of smartphone users use their phones in the bathroom. Which raises the very important question: What the heck are the other 61% doing?

Read more at TechCrunch (via mhh5th)