Eccentric Flower:201009/The Toilet and the Prius

This is going to take a while, so bear with me. I'm trying to join together several trains of thought where the connection between them in my head is totally obvious, but I'm pretty sure it will be far less obvious to you. As usual. In fact, I'm not really sure where to begin. Hmm.

Let's start with the men's toilet where I work.

The men's room on my floor has had some serious sanitation issues over the years. All the men's rooms in my building have some common issues, one of which I will discuss in a moment, but the one on my floor is the worst. My floor is the only one in the building which has classrooms, you see, and when the students are going to or from those classrooms, they use those toilets.

No, no, I'm not saying the students have unsanitary toilet habits. Or maybe I am. It's complicated.

I have to word this carefully to avoid giving away too much about where I work - even the fact that our building contains students of some sort is really almost too much - so pardon me if there's a bit of circumlocution. We have a very high number of non-US-born students. Furthermore, due to our circumstances, often when these students get to us, they have never before attended any other educational institution in the US.

It's not quite as bad as some of the legends from JFK or LAX airports - for example, I've never seen footprints on the toilet seat - but I have seen definite evidence of people who were clearly not accustomed to using sit-down toilets. In case you didn't know, you don't really use toilet paper in squat (hole-in-floor) toilets the same way. Usually they're not designed to handle it, at least not in the same quantities. We've had evidence of people who used no paper; we've had evidence of people who used way too much. We've had feces on the floor, ladies and gentlemen. We've had so many cases where someone assumed that because the toilet could handle toilet paper, it could also handle the paper towels used to dry one's hands (it can't) that a special sign had to be put up. They put one in every toilet, but it was really the toilet on my floor it was for, and everyone knew it. That toilet was being unclogged once a week a few semesters back. (The worst offender must have graduated, since the signs seemed to make no difference while he was here, whoever he was.)

We have one or two germophobes every year who will not touch any fixture in the room with their bare skin. They line the complete seat of the toilet with toilet paper (or the dreaded paper towels), then leave the toilet paper on the seat when they're done, because of course to sweep it into the toilet they'd have to touch it. (After the first wave of this, we got a dispenser with those paper toilet seat covers. I have seen no evidence whatsoever that those ever get used.) They turn the sink taps (I mean the valve handles, I recognize "tap" is ambiguous) with paper towels, and leave the paper towels on the taps. They use a paper towel to pull the door handle when they're leaving, and they let it drop onto the floor. Yes, we do have soap and hand sanitizer available.

The first set of warning signs was replaced by another and then another. The most recent is a set of condescending "toilet etiquette tips" which are so twee that they make me want to litter the entire room with feces just for the pleasure of disobeying them. They're also shockingly nonspecific and so are utterly useless.

This is a case where, really, I feel that the only way to go would be to be direct, specific, and rude. Nothing else will succeed. To date, nothing else has. I want to see signs like:

- In America we sit down on toilets. Please feel free to do so.
- You are not going to get a disease from contact between your ass and a toilet seat. You're just not.
- The chances of you getting a cold from touching the tap are infinitesimal. You'll get it from someone coughing on you first, anyway.
- If you must touch everything with paper towels, there is a trash can located just outside the men's room.
- Not flushing a toilet after use is a sign of poor evolution.

But then, how can we expect passable standards of cleanliness from the users when the cleaning staff rinse out their mops in the hand sinks and don't bother cleaning debris out of the sink - every morning? How can we expect anyone to give a damn about the condition of the toilet floor in a toilet that has a waterless urinal?

I realize that last sentence will take a little elaboration.

All our men's rooms have waterless urinals. Every so often someone gets defensive and puts a little sign above them about all the gallons of water they are saving every year. Which is fine as far as it goes, but here's the thing: The little amount of water that remains in the sump of a non-waterless urinal has a function they don't tell you about. It prevents splashback. You aim the stream of urine at that little pool and the urine hits it and doesn't deflect as much as it is absorbed. The water is a cushion.

In a waterless urinal, no matter where you aim, some of it is going to splash. I don't care how good you are. You will be challenged to keep spots off your pants and shoes, especially your shoes; keeping the floor clear of them is a hopeless cause. And thus, no matter how careful everyone is (and let's face it, many aren't that careful) there is always a small spatter pattern on the floor in a zone ninety degrees of arc and extending roughly two feet out in radius from the urinal.

Waterless urinals are a false economy. Sure, they save water because they don't need to be flushed. Has anyone thought to balance this against the mopping bill? Against the dry cleaning? I don't know what's more disturbing - that the building's management has chosen to buy into this false economy, or that they expect us to believe it - just as they expect us to heed the sign in every toilet to turn off the lights if the room is unoccupied.

What we have in the men's room in my building, in short (and pay attention because here lieth Ye Key Points): We have an unpleasant situation which can only truly be fixed by a social/behavioral change, but which will not be fixed anytime soon because the People In Charge 1) lack the guts to encourage that change, and 2) choose to concentrate on false, distracting, ineffective changes instead. They want us to turn off the lights and buy into waterless urinals, when what they really should be doing is finding the bad behaviors and asking people, "Hey: Do you have the common sense of a turnip or what?"

I mean, even if this isn't your culture, you would think that after the second or third time what you do clogs the toilet, you stop doing that thing and change your ways. You'd think that, but it manifestly isn't true. So the last Key Point is - well, wait, I'm getting ahead of myself.

Let's talk about ecology for a moment. But we'll come back to toilets.

BBC America has been running episodes of "Top Gear" from 2004, which is okay with us, because we haven't seen them before. On one recent one they tear the Prius to pieces. I'm sure they got more than a few letters, just as I'm sure I will raise some mild irritation among my friends for agreeing with them. Such is the power of the mythology among my usual circle of friends, most of whom have a genuine (and worthy!) desire to be, shall we say, environmentally correct.

There's nothing wrong with that desire, so why should you be offended when I point out that the Prius is a fairly lousy way of trying to get closer to that goal? It doesn't perform very well; it is not very well made - but you don't care about those things, right? OK, so let's talk fuel. As "Top Gear" pointed out, a diesel car gets better mileage. The only economy of this car is to use less fossil fuel at the point of consumption - and when you compare the numbers this way to what you'd get if you just drove a diesel car - or if you tried some of the low-consumption techniques of the "hypermilers" - or you just drove your damned car less - you would get results as good or better, and you wouldn't be stuck with a car that is apparently kind of lousy to drive and has a hidden-cost surprise ready to floor you when its battery pack dies.

Of course it is easy to blithely say, "Oh, just drive less in general" when one lives in a town with reasonably sane public transportation and is within walking distance of his office to boot. I understand that, believe me; I grew up in Baton Rouge, a place where it is absolutely impossible to function without having an automobile at your disposal. Not difficult; impossible. Trust me on this.

But here is the thing. Even if you have a car that gets one hundred miles to the gallon; even if the scientists stop gazing at their navels and make something that's actually useful, like a car that runs on, say, salt water, or sand - even if technology intervenes once again to save our asses at the last minute, we will be pursuing the wrong solution once again.

You, the consumer, are being asked to shoulder the burden of the fact that the world is going to run out of oil in your children's lifetime and we have done precious little to prepare for it. You are being made to shoulder the blame and the guilt. This conveniently ignores the fact that the big transportation consumers of petroleum products are 1) commercial trucking 2) commercial shipping 2) commercial passenger aircraft. You're being asked to pinch pennies without being told that it takes a whole lot of us watching the mileage to offset one cross-country eighteen-wheeler. You are the scapegoat.

Why are you the scapegoat? Well, because it's much easier to try to get you to change your ways in small ways than in big ones, my dear. It's easier to try to get you to drive less than to tell you, "Well, jet travel is going to need to get a lot scarcer and a lot more expensive" or "Your food is going to cost more and some things are simply not going to be as available because you have never, NEVER, not since World War II and probably before, paid anything close to the actual hidden transportation costs of your California produce or your Upper Midwest bread, let alone your Chilean out-of-season berries that taste like sawdust anyway."

It's easier to get you to turn out the lights when you leave the room - the falsest of false economies and a lie the government has been peddling you wholesale since 1970 - than to get you to think about, much less take action on, huge inadequacies and inefficiencies in our power supply chain. It's easier to get you to conserve a watt here and there than to convince you to put wind power where you can see it, or to get you to trust nuclear power at all.

But, okay, let's assume for a minute that the Big Problems are so big that they won't be fixed in your lifetime no matter how hard you try. Let's continue to assume that the Little Problems are just a diversionary tactic and beneath contempt. That's not the end of the story because there are still the Medium Problems to consider, and they are being ignored.

Back to cars. The real way to economize on car travel is to drive less. Here we have some problems which are considerably more solvable than, say, reforming the entire power grid of the United States. Ask yourself: Why do we not carpool more? Why do we not bicycle more? Why do we not walk more? Why are our towns not safer for walking and bicycling in the first place? Where is further investment in timeshare/loaner vehicles for the times when you have to haul something? Where is the investment in mass transit, both in having it and making people actually want to use it? These are easily solved problems - they require no new technological innovations, no major reinvention of industries, they just require someone to spend money.

Aren't they?

Well, no, actually, they're not. Because you, the consumer, want to have your cake and eat it too, and you are set in your ways. If the past fifty years have taught us anything, it is that Americans prize their privately-owned automobiles well beyond any reasonableness, beyond any logic. Mass transit in Boston is generally cheap, generally safe and generally reliable; yet it is viewed as a mark of status to be able to not have to use it. People say so every year, in surveys. You don't want to bicycle to work, even if you live close enough to be able to do it, even if you live in a place where it can be done easily and safely, even if your employer offers you showers and an indoor bike rack in a guarded location and a place to hang and store a spare set of clothes. You just don't like doing it.

(Of course I use "you" in the above paragraph to mean the national average, not any specific value of "you." I am reporting what the public has collectively indicated its taste to be, over years of statistical observation, surveys, et cetera by people who have more time and talent than I do. I realize many of you reading this are exceptions; in fact, the percentage of exceptions among the readers of this is likely pretty high. We are not the norm, I don't think.)

The point is: To fix this issue calls for general infrastructure reform of a massive sort, or general social reform of a massive sort, and of the two, it is debatable which is the harder problem ... so the usual response, over the years, has been to hope both problems will go away by themselves and instead concentrate on diversionary tactics involving light bulbs and hybrid cars. And waterless urinals.

(Do you know that there is a worldwide freshwater crisis? Do you know that most freshwater problems could be solved by better use and distribution of available resources, or by actually getting people who are polluting water supplies to stop polluting them - and that, collectively, the governments of the world have shown zero interest in seriously tackling these simple solutions? It makes you wonder if we have any sense of the future or of self-preservation at all.)

Soooooo, a couple of days ago on Twitter I linked this fascinating article about toilet signs all over the world. The article is fascinating because of the variety of signs in it, and I do encourage you to go read it for that before I stomp all over the rest of it. Because, while the signs are great and the sociology behind them is fascinating, I find the thesis of the article (what there is of it) somewhere between dubious and insulting.

Now, get this straight: I speak as someone who has dealt, on more than one occasion, with the issues of gendered toilets, or specifically the "which toilet do I go into when I'm a male in a dress?" question. I feel deeply and personally for the complaints of the trans- or inter-gendered (or simply those who don't care for pigeonholes, which I sympathize with even more deeply) in this matter.

And of course I cannot deny the appeal of just waving one's hand and saying, "OK, well, unisex toilets for everybody everywhere, alakazam, end of problem." I mean, wouldn't that be nice?

But don't you think that if that had a chance in hell of working, more places would be doing it? I mean, on the face of it, it's not just a good social idea; it makes life easier for everyone (except maybe the cleaning crew, who still have to clean the same number of toilets no matter what they're labelled). It reduces "potty parity" issues (in the last twenty years the statistical consensus has been that in public venues like stadiums, women need about twice as many available toilets as men to even stand a chance of getting in and out of the loo in a reasonable/equivalent amount of time) - everyone stands in the same line for the same stalls.

Of course it would mean that men would lose their urinals, and that might be a shame. Women got better emotional makeup, a higher pain threshold, and the ability to think about more than one thing at a time. Men got external genitalia and the ability to pee standing up. Men got so short-changed it seems a shame to take their one superpower away from them. But still - we could probably arrange a compromise - and then we wouldn't have to worry about sexism in the signage because one sign would depict a toilet and the other would depict a urinal. And if the men wanted/needed to use a toilet, they could get in the line with everyone else. (And if they used the toilets we'd make them sit down while they pee, which would result in cleaner toilets and good behavior modification. Oh, wait, I think I just crossed the line into wish-fulfillment. OK, strike that last bit.)

Anyway, point is, it won't work. The reason it won't work is very simple: Men and women don't like sharing toilets. Women are often justifiably motivated by fear, but you know, you can be an evil woman stalker axe murderer sexual predator too. (Doesn't happen as often, but it's possible.) The fear and the rhetoric thereof is partly real, but it is partly a cover for the fact that men and women just don't like being in the same toilets together.

Very few building owners in the present climate would take a chance on lawsuits by introducing unisex toilets, and very few do. The few places I know of where there are unisex toilets in my area are all restaurants in the Republic of Cambridge, where one's hipster cred is bolstered by visible demonstration of how little one cares about such things - where, in other words, unisex toilets earn one a positive style point. There are very, very few places like Cambridge, Massachusetts in the United States.

In short (too late!) I dock the author of the linked article above points for not having a clear thesis in the first place, and I dock her more points for appearing to take the position that we can just wave our hands and say, "OK, massive social change! Bibbity-bobbity-boo!" I mean, I'd like it to be that easy. Wouldn't we all like it to be that easy? But it isn't that easy, and it may never be that easy, in fact it may be so hard that it is not possible ... and to espouse such a stance is at best naive and at worst greatly disingenuous.

I would like to send the author of that piece on an extended sociological trip to Japan, where many women's toilets have a tape loop of rushing water or other white noise so that no one will ever have to hear the sound of women conducting bodily functions. Then we can discuss unisex toilets for everyone.

It is entirely possible that, even with the care I have tried to bring to this piece, I may not have succeeded in linking the cars of the train together, and you are presently wondering why part two and part three are two parts of the same essay. I hope this isn't the case - but if it is, I'm sorry, I don't think I can do any better at explaining than I have already attempted.