‘Tis nice to be back in the land of familiar toilets. 😛
You wouldn’t think that a dunny would be such a big deal, but anyone who has ever spent some time travelling, even if that was just a wee part of your misspent youth on a Contiki tour of Europe, knows that finding decent toilets becomes a major part of your travel experience. It is for this one simple reason, and this alone, that when travelling, we love the fact that McDonalds has take over the world – reliable, clean and conveniently located toilets!
To some of you this is going to seem like a ridiculously pedantic rant from and obsessive compulsive, finickety uptight traveler who should never be allowed to leave her home country! But I have to get it off my chest. You see I HATED American ‘restrooms’ or ‘bathrooms’ or whatever they wanted to call them. Actually, why it’s called a ‘rest room’ I don’t know… it’s not like you go there to put your feet up and kick back and have a kip or relax for a while or take an actual ‘rest’… in fact it’s the last place I’d want to rest but there you have it. But again, I am off my text – American toilets gave me the shits! (Pun intended).
For starters there was the the stall locks. In Australia we have these useful little windows on every toilet stall that tell you whether that stall is occupied or not. It’s a simple concept, you turn the lock and on the outside of the door, it either turns to a ‘Engaged’ sign or simply shows a red colour rather than a green colour to tell you that there is someone in there using the facility. So you look down the row of toilets, see the red or green and know immediately which stall is available for your use. This is particularly useful if the stall doors are quite tall and/or low. And it’s really bloody simple, right?
In the US, it’s like they have never heard of this very simple innovation that has been around in these parts since Methuselah was a child, and I noticed people always walking into bathrooms and wandering down the row of stalls pushing on every door until one gave way in such a manner as to indicate that it was not in use… OR people were bending over to look under the stall doors to find a stall without legs in them! Even in the very fancy be-marbled, floral arranged, chandeliered bathrooms of the classy mega casinos in Las Vegas (like the Bellagio, the Monte Carlo or the Aria) there was the same problem of not knowing if a stall was occupied or not. Fucking pain in the neck if you ask me – literally as you stretched down to see if a stall was vacant or not.
Oh, and while I am on the vacant/occupied indicator door locks – I discovered at Pennsic this strange omission in useful bathroom accoutrements does NOT apply to Portaloos! Go figure! Out in a park or at a festival and you encounter the dreaded plastic temporary dunny and it will happily tell you at a glance if there is anyone in there?!? Why the happy phenomena is evidenced only on outdoor toilets I seriously do not know!
Now those of you who read any of my crap on a regular basis (okay, okay, even sporadic readers will know this), will be well aware of my propensity for never finding a single fault with a system but that I usually find many, many egregious infringements once I start ranting on about something. And the whole American Bathroom experience has not escaped my nitpicking nature. There were several things that I simply could not understand about the simple act of going to the loo in the US.
Other than the complete inability to let users know which stalls were vacant, the other true oddity was the attempts at the ‘Automated Everything’. Now, being an individual with diagnosed obsessive personality traits and having a mild to moderate germophobia, I applaud the automatic everything endeavour in all it’s forms. I don’t want to have to touch no skanky buttons and levers if I don’t have to, so more power to it, I say. Bring on the automation. Only, it has to be consistent! Toilets that flush automatically are great, no touching the potentially germ infested flushing buttons – but they have to be better at not flushing while you are still on the damn things! Seriously nothing is quite so disconcerting and alarming as the stupid toilet flushing while you’re trying to pee. It’s just not on.
The next item of irritation was the automatic soap dispensers. Awesome plan, and usually conveniently located right near the tap (faucet, for those on the other side of the pond), but they have to get the timing right… so many auto soap dispensers that drop the soap AFTER you have waved your hands around and given up in disgust then watch it plop onto the bench or into the sink once you’ve gone to try the one at the next basin. The automatic taps were much better, wave and ta-da! water comes out… but if you’re in frickin’ Alaska, and all they are going to give you is freezing cold ambient temperature water – fuck that shit, I wanna control it thanks!
But the bathrooms that really did my head in were the ones where you had stalls (with no engaged/vacant locks, of course) with automatic flushing toilets, automatic soap dispensers, automatic taps and then… a stupid fucking ‘gajunga gajunga’ pull down lever thing on the paper towel dispenser to dry your hands! So close, but no cigar!
All that effort and expense to enable patrons to get through the bathroom process without having to touch anything that might transfer bacteria and contagions and they fail at the last minute for lack of a Dyson Airblade!
