Performing #1 and #2 in comfort and style since 1995

In case you are the weird sort of person who does not actually read the titles of blog posts, allow me to repeat it here:

I don’t care if you are at the beach – you still don’t go to the bathroom barefoot!

Why, you may ask, am I feeling so passionate about this tidbit today? Well it just so happens that I went to the beach yesterday. (The beach with these toilets, as a matter of fact). And while I was at the beach, it just so happens that I went to the bathroom. And even though I was in my bare feet for most of the morning, I made sure to slap some shoes on before entering the bathroom.

Because bathroom floors outside of your home are gross. These in particular were soaking wet and covered in sand. The sand makes sense. And the wet makes sense too, what with the wet and sandy people going pee all day long.

But I guarantee you that was not just ocean water on the floor. There was pee – and lots of it. Let’s examine the facts:

1. People are really bad at aiming their pee
2. People don’t like to clean up after themselves
3. Because the floor was already wet with water, people totally think they can get away with not cleaning up their pee

Well listen up people – you’re not fooling me!

I don’t read Mountain Flyer magazine, but when I saw their most recent ad over at Fat Cyclist, I thought that maybe I should start.

See, I do enjoy reading on the potty, and if their ad is any indication, Mountain Flyer Magazine is particularly well suited for that medium.

Mountain Flyer: If you are listening, why don’t you send me a copy, and I’ll be sure to put it through its paces!

I just went pee in the public bathroom here at work – fascinating, I know. After finishing my business at the urinal, I headed to the sinks where I encountered an individual lurking around in a rather creepy fashion. Kind of just stalking around with a sour look on his face.

At first I was totally confused, since there was an available urinal, but it turns out he had been waiting for the one I had occupied (the other is kiddie-sized) since as soon as it auto-flushed, he headed in.

Which brings us to the topic of delay tactics.

There are any number of reasons you might need to kill some time in a bathroom – waiting for a urinal or stall to become available for example. And there are good ways and bad ways to kill this time.

Pacing around is one of the bad ways! Wash your hands. Check your teeth. Adjust your hair. Fish an imaginary eyelash out of your eye. Really, do something, anything other than just lurk around.

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.

In bladder voiding as in real estate, it’s location location location.

-Dr. Sheldon Cooper, The Big Bang Theory, Season 2, Episode 15

Hard to argue with that!

Before today, I had never heard of a company called Cuil. And based on the content of their new automated encyclopedia Cpedia, I have a pretty good idea why. Here, reproduced for all posterity because I can’t imagine this company hanging around for very long, is the entry on yours truly:

Michael Sykes (Founder)

Michael Sykes founded the International Center for Bathroom Etiquette 13 years ago, while studying at the University of Alberta. Newspapermen eat a lot of poutine.

Michael Sykes, President of The International Center for Bathroom Etiquette, has a few turd tips for those uncomfortable dumping dilemmas. For starters, he advises, Nobody is fooled by running water to cover sounds.

Another giveaway that you re dropping the kids off at the pool is staying in the John too long, so only go when your bowels are about to burst. You can request samples at the Wireless Flash web site.

Founded in 1995 by Dr. Michael Sykes, the International Center for Bathroom Etiquette initially focused on the particular challenges that men face when selecting the proper urinal in a public bathroom. The mission of the ICBE is to improve the bathroom going experience for everyone by educating people about proper bathroom etiquette.

University of Alberta professor

To Michael Sykes’s mother, he’s a successful biophysicist following in the footsteps of his father, a University of Alberta professor.

Newspapermen eat a lot of poutine indeed.

See the entry here

via Marco

Seriously – the bathroom floor is not for your stuff. I don’t ever want to walk into the bathroom and see your leather briefcase lying on its side on the floor every again.

Please?

The ridiculously hot Mrs Dr ICBE and I had a rare child-free evening this past weekend, which we decided to spend at Cirque du Soleil. If you’ve ever been to Cirque before, you have a pretty good idea of how our evening went. It was pretty much 2.5 hours of Oh my god, how are they doing that! and Please, please, please don’t fall off! and Oh yeah, I could totally do that if I was wearing better shoes.

What I did not expect however was my first (First!) ever sighting of a dual-flush toilet in the flesh porcelain. Cirque uses those super-fancy almost like actual bathrooms porta-potties, and this is what awaited me inside, on top of the toilet:

Conveniently, they even had a sign explaining everything:

We are using dual-flush toilets to reduce our water consumption.

Now I’m not a big fan of the euphemisms of “Solid” for poop and “Liquid” for pee, but I’m prepared to cut them some slack for their water conservation efforts. Nice!

It’s Friday, and it’s been a long week of incessant #1 and #2 here at the ICBE. Ever feel like you go pee, and then a couple hours later you just have to go pee again? Makes me wonder what the point is sometimes, but I digress. Things have been building up in the inbox, and it’s time to shed some weight, starting with sensible discussion over at The Blue. Seriously though, if the people over at Metafilter cannot discuss a topic sensibly, then that topic cannot be discussed sensibly.

1) The Sexual Politics of Toilets

All that work, and she doesn’t even mention transgender public restroom facilities?

-zarq

2) Animal, Biodegradable and Compost Toilets

Sh_ttiest FPP we’ve seen in a long time.

-cenoxo (pun intended!)

3) Pants Pankuro: Toilet training in Japan

As somebody who makes a living by (among other things) toilet training tiny little Japanese children, I have seen Pants Pankuro on many, many diapers but never knew his name until this post. Thanks!

-emmling

Remember everyone, as we posted last week – today is World Water Day (more info here and here). And if that’s not enough, it’s an opportunity for you to stand in the World’s Longest Toilet Queue.

Now we talk about a lot of silly stuff here at the ICBE, but affordable, reliable access to clean water is a really serious matter, and a really serious problem for over a billion people.

I have had the privilege of living in both Canada and the USA where this has never been a problem. If I need clean water, I just turn on a tap for a limitless supply. We waste billions of gallons on such trivial tasks as watering lawns. If a homeless person needs a drink, in all of the cities I’ve ever lived all they had to do was walk to one of the numerous public water fountains.

If you’re reading this, you’ve got internet access, and chances are you’ve got plenty of clean water too. If you do nothing else to recognize World Water Day, at least take a minute to sit back and think about how lucky you are.