Bathroom Noises Around The World

In My Humble Opinion
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      • We have some Mongolian people who clean the floors where I work. It has been noticed that when in the bathroom, they continually flush the toilets (we presume) to disguise the undignified noise of dropping Junior in the log flume.
  • And I recall reading that water-saving toilets were a fairly big failure in Japan, for the same reason: people flushed them constantly the entire time they were using the facilities, negating any water-conserving benefits.
  • So how common is this practice? Being in the middle of the US, we at work did a minor poll among the guys present, and not one of them had ever felt the need to do this. Should we change our habits? If the toilets aren’t noisy enough, what else can be done? Should we do the “Tarzan yell”? - DougC
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I’ve never done it; I don’t think my mates have either (I had to explain the “Awww… give us a courtesy flush at least” joke in Austin Powers).

I can’t imagine using a toilet and flushing it at the same time: it’d be hard to twist around and hit the button, plus there’s the fear that eau de toilet would splash up and wet me.

And there’s what the Master had to say about toilet flushing: Does flushing the toilet cause dirty water to be spewed around the bathroom? I really don’t want concentrated toilet aerosol sprayed on my exposed bottom. :eek:

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As stated in another thread: Here in Scandinavia we have proper toilets with lockable doors, not the weird collective loos you are forced to use in US.

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Uh, I dunno what your talking about Floater, but every stall I’ve been in has a door with some sort of latch to lock it…

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I’m talking about each toilet being a proper room with a real door filling up the entire door frame, one throne and one washbasin as opposed to the, in my opinion, weird communal toilets with mere cubicles that can be seen in e.g. Ally McBeal.

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Oh, Gotcha. I guess most US corporations don’t have the money to or the office space to do such a thing. Personally I think we should all have portapotty’s as chairs, but no one else seems to like that idea…

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Where do you work with mongolian custodians? I can’t imagine why they would flush like this. No offence to the Mongols out there, but most places in Mongolia don’t have running water, much less bathroom facilities.

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Tennessee?

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      • This is in St. Louis, MO/USA…
        ~
  • Actually, the Mongolian guys are history. The one actually employed got fired yesterday, so we may never know…
  • The private company that cleans the floors is owned by a 30-ish Russian immigrant (like, he lived in Russia up until a couple years ago). He gets lots of other immigrants to work for him, I do not know exactly how (he speaks pretty good English and I’d ask, but he hardly ever comes in and then is very businesslike, talking to the people working for him and then leaving). He will hire US people (he has in the past), but the work/pay is not real desirable. Over the last few months, he mostly had Mongolians working for him. Two Russians were there last night.
  • Two brothers got put at my store: one spoke English fairly well, but the other almost not at all. That was why I was asking for Mongolian language learning software (it’s better IMO than books&tapes, but there isn’t any software, and I only found one book that had an accompanying tape available).
    They got into a fight over a childhood incident, and the first one left a few weeks ago (went back to Chicago, from whence they both came). The first guy was very open and friendly, but the second guy is somewhat of a surly hard-drinking SOB, not the real talkative type, unless it’s job-related. As for the others, it’s difficult to try to speak to any of them, because they keep working the whole time except when they take breaks, and they take theirs at different times from when we take ours.
  • The remaining one got other Mongol friends (also all recent immigrants) to help out from time to time. Usually they spoke very little English, if any. I have always thought it would be interesting to ask them about the places they came from and why they left, but the individual people turned over pretty quickly and trying to learn Mongolian pronunciation from just reading a book is basically pointless. He said last night that he was moving to Arkansas… there are small immigrant communities in major cities; he said there are maybe 150 Mongolian immigrants living in the Saint Louis area, and they often assist each other with getting jobs, apartments, etc.
  • I note that many of the Mongolian people have known how to speak Russian, so perhaps they are all from the same region of their country. - DougC