Urinals

Ok this is one of my biggest pet peeves. I know this isn't my first post about urinals (there are three), but I think it might be the most frustrating. I work in an office building and there are three urinals in the bathroom on my floor. There are two regular sized urinals and then a short one on the end. This pisses the hell out of me.

The first person who goes to the bathroom naturally takes the regular sized one on the end. I have never seen anyone go for the kiddie or middle urinal when given the option. You can't go next to the first guy when a spacer is available (rule two). So that means when the second person comes in they have to pee in the kiddie urinal (rule six). So why not put the kiddie urinal in the middle? That way the first two get the regular sized urinals with a spacer. It's not like there are ever three people peeing simultaneously. Plus I imagine etiquette would dictate that if you come upon a sole-remaining double flanked kiddie you use a stall.

Also as a side note, why the hell is there a kiddie urinal in an office building? I mean granted there is a midget, but he works on a different floor. Can't the children and little professionals just use the stall, I mean, I doubt I could pee if there was a midget peeing next to me. I would fear getting my backspray on his shirt or something.

Brian Improves Working Conditions

A few weeks ago I was sitting in the break room at work. I was very bored and decided to fill out a safety suggestion form. Too bad the best safety suggestion I could come up with was this:

(I wish I could scan this in...)

Describe Problem:
Lack of divider between the urinals of the breakroom bathroom. Dangerous crossflow combined with the minimal urinal spacing makes for a hard situation when multiple people need to pee.
Your Proposed Solution:
Add a divider or respace the urinals to allow for better access to waste resources. Unfortunately this will limit Ipod sharing while using the bathroom.

Well a few weeks later I got this in my mailbox:

Hello Brian

While the Safety Committee doesn't view your suggestion in the safety category, but still deserves a response.
We actually investigated and priced out how we might expand the bathroom facilities at Kipke several years ago. The women's bathroom is even more limited than the men's and that is what prompted that study. It would be very costly to reconfigure the facilities and we (management) decided not to pursue it.

The urinals in the men's room are very close together, but there is not room enough to space them differently without redoing the plumbing (another costly item). We could remove one urinal, but feel that having two is better in case one is out of service.

We suggest is that if one of the urinals is occupied that you use one of the enclosed toilets instead.

Michael Bodary, Senior Buyer

Haha can you believe that someone had to actually dignify that suggestion with a page long response. He even gave me a suggestion as to how I could avoid any awkward situations. To bad he didn't address the issue of Ipod sharing. Oh well.

I think this means I am entered into a safety drawing. If I win money because if this...

Picture Blog?

Added new stadium picture from this morning. It's really big.




The steel work from the stadium construction project. It is hard to see, but the scale is large. Bleachers now extend to the distance that they do in the end zones, and the steel structure of the luxury boxes extend above the height of the scoreboard. It looks very intense.

My favorite place to pee at U of M. I'll buy a beer for anyone who can name the location of these three magnificent full urinals. (Note one flush fits all)


One reason not to leave unattended hot coals on your porch. Your house could catch on fire. I guess a hookah ignited a couch which spread to the house. This house is about 6 houses down from where I used to live. I hope this doesn't cause the city of Ann Arbor to change their porch furniture policy. Couches don't cause house fires, unless you still believe in spontaneous combustion. Things that are on fire cause fires. Duh.

Poops

I'm sorry if this post is a little Shitty.

I have a fear of taking poops in public restrooms. I have never been a big fan. Actually until last month I had only ever taken 3 poops in public toilets. Once in 9th grade in order to get out of running during gym. There was no toilet paper and the toilet overflowed, needless to say it was miserable. Then one more time junior year, before a pep assembly, that otherwise would have resulted in my death. It was possibly the foulest thing that has ever occurred. Then there was this one time last summer that I wrote a blog post about but never published. Here it is:

Normally I don't like to poop away from home base. But some dire circumstances resulted me in taking a level 6 Power Dump in the basement of the Union. The last 2 poops that I took in a public bathroom were once during my Junior year of high school right before a pep rally that left me so dehydrated that I almost passed out. And once freshmen year during gym to get out of running. But my life choices Saturday of 3 Coney Dogs from Mr. Greeks, and a fifth of Cisco finally caught up to me Sunday at 3pm.

I do work in the basement of the Union because I can get free refills of cola while I work, there are a few computers down there. Halfway into my operations modeling homework the hammer fell. I didn't want to give up so easily, and thought it would just go away. It turns out my band aid solution was a complete failure. Plus I knew that our bathroom at home only had paper towel, which is a weak substitute for TP. It cleans up the mess, but it burns. I ended up penguin walking to the bathroom and barely making it to the handicapped stall. From there it all went to hell. I was playing this homeless dude in battle shits turd for turd. He would fart, I would blow ass. Due to a faulty sensor, every time I would move the toilet would flush, which probably needed to be done anyways. I went into that stall a boy and came out a man. Plus the look of the admiring homeless man made me feel quasi-gay quasi-hero. It was an experience that will not be soon forgotten.

Perhaps I should explain why I don't like pooping in public. It's not the cleanliness of the bathroom that's the problem, its the judging. I always fear like everyone is thinking "Ohh, there's that kid taking a shit again." Like if it is really smelly people will judge you. Or usually you have to pee before you can start pooping, and the pee is always audible. What if people think you just in there peeing sitting down. They can see your shoes you know. Also, when I poop I tend to start the show with a fart. Actually, I have this problem with peeing, sometimes you just need a fart to get things moving. There is something awkward about ripping one in front of people, even in a bathroom. I always start to laugh, which is a weird thing to do while taking a poop or pee in public. So maybe I am just self conscious about it, but what the hell do I know I'm just in the middle of a poop war.

My roommate Pete has absolutely no problem with this. One time he made me stop in a KFC in Portage to poop, and he didn't even buy anything. Once at McDonald's he took a poop while waiting for his food. A McDonald's? Really? He holds off until he gets to north campus to poop. But maybe that's because the state of toilets at our house.

But thing have begun to change. I am overcoming my fear, through the magical discovery of the office poop. I was first tipped off of it's presence by my friend Paul, in an email from last summer.

I’ve scheduled all my poops so that they occur during work time. It’s fantastic.

So now that I have started work and realized that when Peter Gibbons said "I'd say in a given week I probably only do about fifteen minutes of real, actual, work" he was actually right. So I needed a way to fill the other 39 hours. That is done by office poops. It's like a free break. I am really coming into my own in the genre, and I even sometimes bring in my Ipod or crossword. Usually after I finish I issue a field report to Evan on GChat, he is teaching me some of the finer aspects of the office poop. But hopefully this will help me overcome my fear of public dumps in general. It reminds me of a passage in a book I was reading a bit ago.

On the way out, as I stopped to use the bathroom, I found Extramask
standing there, twirling an unwashed lock of hair in his fingers. "Are you
waiting for the toilet?" I asked.
"Sort of," he replied nervously. "Go ahead."
I gave him a quizzical look. "Can I tell you something?" he asked.
"Sure."
"I have a lot of trouble peeing beside guys in urinals. When there's another guy standing there, I can't fucking pee. Even if I'm peeing already and
a guy walks up, I stop. And then I just stand there all nervous and shit."
"No one's judging you."
"Yeah," he said. "I remember about a year ago, a guy and I were trying
to piss in these urinals that were right next to each other, but we both just
ended up standing there. We stood there for around two minutes, recognizing each other's pee-shyness, until I zipped up and went to another
bathroom."
He paused. "The guy never thanked me for changing bathrooms that
day."
As I left the bathroom, he was still standing there. "I always liked urinal
dividers," he said. "But you only seem to find them at the classy places."

By the end of the book, he has learned to pee next to other dudes.

I even have some friends who every June partake in a gentleman's game of office poops. In the game you count your poops incurred at work during the month. There is no prize, and it is done on the honor system. So it just shows that there is a group of people in this crazy mixed up world that does not reject the office poop, but rather warmly embrace their ability to dump while at work.