It’s not like I’d fire you if I were your boss or stop talking to you if we were coworkers. However, I don’t think you should use it just because you want to. If all stalls are filled up and you can’t wait, sure go ahead. If there is an open regular stall, use that. If you are in the ADA stall you have no way to tell if the person that comes in after you has use for it.
I’d also be willing to wager that a place where people are toting around heavy boxes all day has a lot of people with back and knee pain that could very well make use of that stall.
I don’t know if you are Muslim or not but a hypothetical question occurs to me:
Am I an asshole for using the ablution room at my work if I’m not Muslim?
Like some others in the thread I had not heard of an ablution room before. I read some about it but didn’t learn many details such as, are these strictly only for Muslims or for anyone?
Yep, that’s why I brought it up. Not Muslim, though technically the ablution room is sort of an offshoot room contained in this rest room, The rest room itself I guess is not technically an ablution room. It just contains one. It also happens to be the least trafficked, newest, and cleanest one in the building. I am always clean and respectful.
You shouldn’t use the handicapped facilities if you don’t need them.
You shouldn’t make phone calls in the breast pumping room if you’re not pumping breast.
You shouldn’t create a situation where someone unexpectedly needs to use a purpose-built facility, and they’re faced with having to negotiate with you through the stall door for permission to use something that was placed for their necessity, not your own convenience.
Sure, it’s honor system, but if people don’t follow the honor system, guess what happens? A keycard, or a security system, or a potty cop. And then you’ll complain about how stupid it is to have armed guards policing the handicapped stalls.
If it’s not for you, don’t use it. How is this hard?
They’re for ritual ablution. If you don’t need to ritually ablute, why intrude?
And how is it hard for you to understand that in a bathroom with two stalls, the intent of making one of those two stalls accessible is not to reduce the bathroom capacity by 50% when only a small number of people need the accessibility.
Nobody is disputing that the accessible stall should not be used if another stall is open. But it’s not practical to suggest that everyone else should form a line and wait for the other stall when the accessible stall is not being used.
There is no reduction in capacity. The intent is a certain capacity for abled people and a certain capacity for disabled people. You can only construe this as a “reduction” if you believe that handicapped facilities are intended as overflow for abled people. But I don’t believe you can show that your assumption is the reality here.
This is plainly not what the OP described. He’s asking why he shouldn’t be able to use other people’s facilities simply because he feels like doing so. You seem to projecting some over-eager optimization onto this situation.
You did not restrict your opinion to OP’s circumstances, and the thread is a broader discussion. Perhaps you should read it to take in other perspectives before condemning others with such moralistic certainty.
Of course there would be. In the vast majority of locations, the proportion of people with a relevant disability is far smaller than the proportion of accessible stalls. And that’s exactly why accessible stalls are rarely labeled as restricted for the exclusive use of those who require them.
In fact, your mistaken belief that accessible stalls are exclusively for disabled people would be a regressive step, since it would never be appropriate to make (say) 2 out of 4 stalls accessible where space is not restricted.
What’s important for bathrooms is that people who cannot wait need quick access. There may be a weak correlation between requiring an accessible stall and reduced bowel control, but the majority of people with a disability are not incontinent, and no less able to wait a few minutes; while plenty of people who do not require an accessible stall may have IBS or just ordinary diarrhea and do need quick access to any stall.
So it seems to me that common sense “not being a jerk” priorities should be:
(1) Don’t use an accessible stall if another one is open.
(2) Don’t occupy any stall longer than necessary in a busy bathroom, don’t sit there reading a paper to skive off work.
Sorry, but you are incorrect here. The intent of handicapped stalls is to assure there are some stalls accessible to those with certain disabilities. * No, handicapped stalls are not intended as overflow for abled people - but they are also not for the exclusive use of the handicapped. If they were, then a building with nothing but single-stall handicapped accessible restrooms has no restrooms that can be used by the non-handicapped and one with a two stall restroom would be allocating 50% of the capacity to the handicapped that need the larger stall. ( which is not going to be anywhere near 50% of the people using the restroom) Building codes require a certain number of fixtures based on capacity - and then one of that number must be wheelchair accessible. There is no expectation that a office building that has say, two female restrooms with ten stalls each, one of which is wheelchair-accessible and one of which is ambulatory-accessible must function as if there were only 16 stalls total if there are no handicapped people present at the moment.
Handicapped restroom stalls are not the same as handicapped parking spaces , which are for the exclusive use of the handicapped.
* As far as I can tell, the actual requirements are that each restroom must have at least one wheelchair accessible stall and restrooms with more than six toilets/urinals must also have an ambulatory accessible stall (for people who need support, for example to transfer from crutches or a walker)
That’s completely wrong. Most ADA stalls are retrofits, where a regular stall is literally removed to make space for it. And where new restrooms are planned, the number of stalls needed for the facility is calculated including the ADA stalls.
Some retrofits end up making the regular stalls narrower in order to make room for the ADA stall(s). That makes the ADA stall more tempting.
There are not going to be locks or card readers or potty police if people use the ADA stalls because they are ACCESSIBLE only.
What about the situation I posted, where the only toilet in the staff men’s room is ADA compliant? There’s nobody who needs it on staff but we should still not use it and just “hold it in” for the rest of our shift?
It’s not just about urgently needing to actually use the loo - although it’s much more than a weak correlation, since people with paraplegia and quadriplegia often (but not always, of course) have bags that need emptying.
It’s that if you’re in a wheelchair or need the bars to help you get up and down off the toilet then there might not be another toilet you can use, while other people have more options. And if you’re able to walk, but painfully (but need the accessible loo for the helper bars or because the other loos are only accessed by stairs), then standing to wait causes you extra pain.
If the general access loos are very busy then of course it’s rude to sit there and make people wait, but that’s often not the case, especially at workplaces.
That’s true - but it’s also true that a lot of people need wheelchairs/walkers/the grab bars for reasons other than paraplegia or quadriplegia.
But I’m not really sure what you’re saying- are you saying that no one should ever use the handicapped stall if they don’t actually need it, even if there is a line of people waiting for the general access ones and no one waiting with a wheelchair/walker/crutches or who doesn’t fit in the general access stalls - or just that people who can use the other stalls shouldn’t use the handicapped stall if another stall is available?
Not at all - I thought I’d posted my opinion, but actually I’d just responded to a more specific point. This topic comes up so often that I forgot I hadn’t actually answered the main question.
I think accessible stalls should be prioritised for people who definitely need them. And rather than judging whether you think other people need them, you judge whether you need them. (If that makes sense).
In February I was at a small theatre and the queue for the loos in the interval was immense, and everyone was treating the disabled loo as a general access loo. That did piss me off because it’s really difficult and painful for me to use the loo, and I could only use the accessible one, so I had a much longer wait. Eventually my partner asked for me so I could go ahead of the line, but we got some very evil looks despite my mobility problems being fairly easy to see. That was shitty behaviour.
The very worst one was when I’d booked special assistance at an airport, and the staff member took me to use the disabled loo, but it was locked and we ended up waiting over twenty minutes. We could hear someone moving around, sprays being used, then even a buzzing sound. Then out came a pilot. He’d been using the loo to have a wash, shave, brush his teeth, etc, like it was his own private bathroom, and put on so much deodorant and aftershave that we had to wait a few more minutes to air the room out - it was making even the special assistance staff member cough!
It’s highly unlikely the pilot was disabled, and even if he were, that wouldn’t excuse his behaviour. I have a feeling he ended up being reported and in trouble - the special assistance staff member was really pissed off.
But sometimes, like at the OP’s workplace, it’s not as important. Go for the general access loos in general, yes. And for the disabled access loo, disabled people should get priority, so if there are two people waiting, one of whom is you and you’re not disabled, you should offer to let them go first (you don’t know if they’re disabled, but you know about yourself). And you shouldn’t spend ages in them. That would be enough to make sure disabled people have priority almost all the time.
Lots of disabled loos here are only accessible with a special key (called a radar key), but that’s more because of people abusing the facilities for drugs and sex than because they don’t want non-disabled people using them.
To the OP, no problem. I worked several years at a place where there were two toilet cubicles outside our office area. 50 women, 2 men, the toilets weren’t labelled with a gender, but one was bigger and set up for disabled people of which we had none at work. Everyone just used which ever one was free and they got cleaned every day.
We just converted part of the space (suite?) in the “mother’s room” to an ablution room and a prayer room. Building with a capacity of around 1000 with probably <10 Muslims. But I bet the number of women expressing milk was even lower than 10, but we had six rooms each with overstuffed chairs and a sink, now we have four.
Thanks to hybrid work arrangements there are probably never more than 300 people in the building at one time.
I’m confused why this meant you waited longer than anyone else? If the queue was immense, didn’t that mean lots and lots of people were standing there crossing their legs?
I have no issue with anyone who urgently needs the loo cutting in line, whether their urgency is due to difficulty standing in line or a bout of diarrhea. But it seems like it would have been crazy to leave the handicapped stall empty, and make everyone else wait even longer.
Because I needed to use the disabled access loo to use the handles to get me up and down, and everyone else also had the choice of the 8 general access loos. Several times I was at the front of the queue, but only the general access ones were available, so I had to keep waiting.
The disabled access loo would not have been empty, it would have been being used by me and any other disabled people (doubt I was the only one).
Unless nearly an eighth of the people in line were disabled, which seems unlikely, the disabled loo would have been empty part of the time, decreasing the effective capacity and increasing the total average waiting time. That is to say, of it was ever empty, people were waiting to pee longer than they had too. And it was already too long a wait.
If your disabilities make it hard for you to wait, you were right to cut in line. But i think everyone else was right to keep all the loos constantly occupied when there’s a long line.
I honestly think that a large fraction of the people in that crowd had to “wait much longer” because there weren’t enough restrooms.
I never said it should be left empty, though. You’re arguing against something I didn’t say.
My wait was longer and caused me more pain because I needed the disabled access loo and people without disabilities were treating it as like any other loo (it’s highly unlikely everyone in the queue was disabled). That’s not OK.