Actually I feel exactly the same way about commissary baggers on military installations but I won’t go there in this thread.
[QUOTE=arseNal]
These days, it has gotten to the point where some places will flat out refuse entry to a guy without a girl. Heaven help a group of guys who roll up to one of these joints without some ladies to balance out the ratio.
[/QUOTE]
I wouldn’t go to a place like that if I was accompanied by a harem of supermodels. Actually mostly I just go to my neighborhood bar now, though lately it’s become infested with hipsters. I keep telling them they can’t spray just once!
[QUOTE=Baldwin]
I thought these guys only existed in the movies. Are there still buildings with elevator operators also?
[/QUOTE]
At least a couple years ago the Fine Arts Building in Chicago had one. It has an ancient elevator that doesn’t automatically stop level to the floor, so it’s for safety reasons.
Also, my office building (quite modern) has one in the freight elevator to keep track of things - the position is part of the rotation of the building guards, but they do operate the elevator.
[QUOTE=Stinkpalm]
Do ladies rooms have attendants? I’ve always wondered.
[/QUOTE]
Occasionally, yes. Same routine as the men’s – she hands you a towel and offers to squirt you with perfume. Obviously she doesn’t give massages because we sit in stalls in the U.S. Don’t know about Europe.
It makes me equally uncomfortable. Cleaning bathrooms is a crappy job on its own. Having to be in the room while people crap is a whole new level of bad.
[QUOTE=THespos]
Replace “men’s bathroom attendant” with “telemarketer” and watch the sympathy for the poor schlub doing the job completely dematerialize.
[/QUOTE]
If men’s room attendants walked into my home and started toweling my hands and spraying me with cologne while I was eating dinner…
I guess I’d learn to lock the door. 
[QUOTE=Merkwurdigliebe]
YYou go in, and (not always inside, but usually in the hallway before both rooms) you’ll see an older lady sitting there with a plate with a few coins on it. Honestly I’ve only seen this in Germany and the Netherlands. Maybe France too. Not Spain or Scandinavia. You don’t have to pay, but I generally pay something if I use the toilet and nothing for the urinal. Now, granted. They are usually pretty clean, but how does this system even work?
[/QUOTE]
I’m guessing in that case, you pay them to not watch you. Pretty good racket, actually. Get yourself a chair and take the door off the stall. The Euros roll in.
[QUOTE=Merkwurdigliebe]
As for the American, upscale thing? It’s awful. I feel sorry for them. But it’s a totally unnecessary job. It shouldn’t exist. I understand luxury I guess, but I don’t want a guy watching me pee.
[/QUOTE]
See, I don’t think it has anything to do with luxury. I’ve never seen this in a legitimate nice place where a real, live rich people would hang out, not that I go to joints like that often. They have attendants at titty bars and clubs catering to what I call the “thirty thousand dollar a year millionaire” crowd. Clubs full of steak-heads where you are going to have fights, sex, and people doing Bogotá Bam-Bam off the toilet tanks without some kind of security.
The club can either higher another bouncer or get paid by a guy willing to sit in the bathroom and sell trinkets.
And, no, I don’t feel sorry for people who choose to attend bathrooms, telemarket, or sell flowers in bars. If your way of supporting yourself is to annoy the piss out of me, adding no value whatsoever, then I’d rather just pay you not to bother with it.
[QUOTE=Evil Captor]
C’mon, the guy is already a men’s bathroom attendant. He’s pretty much at the bottom of the food chain where jobs are concerned. I mean, I’d rank a variety of forms of unemployment as much better than being a men’s bathroom attendant. In fact, the only form of unemployment I’d rank below it would be unemployed and homeless.
[/QUOTE]
Right on. I mean, I really don’t care about gum or aftershave, but you have to admit, a nightclub men’s room can turn into a swamp in 10 minutes if someone isn’t taking care of it.
Yes, bathroom attendants make me feel uncomfortable. But if they’ve ensured an adequate reserve of paper towels and TP, wiped down any any surface I must touch, sit in, or stand upon, and there is nobody fornicating in the stalls, how can you not cough up a buck for a guy trying to make an honest living cleaning up other people’s piss?
I went to a “club” in St. Louis not too long ago (it was ladies’ night, so no cover & $1 drinks brought me there (with my husband:))) which had bathroom attendants. I was mighty surprised, although when a massive fight attemped to break out between a couple of the girls, I was pretty gratified. The attendant also halped a girl avoid a guy who was freaking her out/following her around creepily, which might not be a normal duty but which I would have tipped well for.
Also, my husband spent talked to bathroom attendant at the local Larry Flint’s, and the guy actually used to be a high school chemistry teacher… no word on why/how he had become a bathroom attendant, though.
[QUOTE=Baldwin]
I thought these guys only existed in the movies. Are there still buildings with elevator operators also?
[/QUOTE]
Department stores in Japan for all those shoppers who wouldn’t be able to figure how to push the buttons on their own.
[QUOTE=Stinkpalm]
Do ladies rooms have attendants? I’ve always wondered.
[/QUOTE]
Only at one club do I recall seeing one. She has all these jars of things, combs, gum, candy, mints, kleenex.. incidentals that you might not think to drop in your little purse for a night at the club but might end up needing. She also usually hands out paper towel and coupons for the club. Nice lady.
Remember that we’re not talking about the bathroom attendants you might find at a classy restaurant or hotel. We’re talking about the pushy, dirty ones at nightclubs that leave you with the feeling of being shaken down.
In many nightclubs, you can’t make the claim that “the bathroom attendant is there to attend to you and help you” with a straight face. The attendant is there to harass or embarrass you into giving him a tip at an already-overpriced club. I think you’d have trouble finding anybody in the club legitimately thankful for their “help.”
[QUOTE=TheLoadedDog]
Now, in Asia, on the other hand…
<snip> your eyes adjust to the change in light out of the busy bar you’ve just left, and you find there is a grumpy, wizened old lady sitting on a stool by the door
[/QUOTE]
I can’t believe you guys let this one go…!
[QUOTE=Merkwurdigliebe]
You go in, and (not always inside, but usually in the hallway before both rooms) you’ll see an older lady sitting there with a plate with a few coins on it. Honestly I’ve only seen this in Germany and the Netherlands. Maybe France too. Not Spain or Scandinavia. You don’t have to pay, but I generally pay something if I use the toilet and nothing for the urinal. Now, granted. They are usually pretty clean, but how does this system even work? A full-time janitor for one set of bathrooms? It’s a shit job, I know, but why tip them? I don’t like being shamed into paying money to use the bathroom. I’ve done shit jobs before (I’d rather deal with bathrooms than garbage, like I did) and I never expected to get paid. On the other hand if I were doing it in my older years I’d be a bit cross too.
If you want to make fees for using the bathroom, fair enough. I don’t want to be coerced into paying through guilt.
[/QUOTE]
I’ve seen this in Austria, Poland, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic as well. In my experience, if you try to sneak by without paying, they don’t just try to guilt you into it; they at least yell at you.
[QUOTE=OneCentStamp]
Not only did my mommy teach me how to wash up when I was three, I got a great refresher course on the finer points of hand washing when I got my food handler’s permit to work at the Arby’s in tenth grade.
[/QUOTE]
All the way back to the OP for this off-topic addendum: food handler’s permit? There’s a state enforced guild for fast food employees?
[QUOTE=UncleBeer]
All the way back to the OP for this off-topic addendum: food handler’s permit? There’s a state enforced guild for fast food employees?
[/QUOTE]
It’s actually for anyone who works with a product that ends up being eaten by humans - I had to go get another one at age 25 when I worked at a nutritional supplement factory, even though all we made was pills and tablets. It was crap about hand washing, temperature zones, cross contamination, etc.
“Mr. Nightclub Bathroom Attendant” should be in the next “Real Men of Genius” commercial.
[QUOTE=THespos]
Replace “men’s bathroom attendant” with “telemarketer” and watch the sympathy for the poor schlub doing the job completely dematerialize.
[/QUOTE]
I’m not being sympathetic, I’m just saying someone who’s working as a men’s bathroom attendant is so low on the social hierarchy scale that it just isn’t worthwhile to kick them.
Harrod’s in London had a female attendant. She kept the garbage cans from overflowing, and wiped down the changing table (nice touch).
I am uncomfortable with the old crones who lurk in the shadows (I’ve seen them in both my grandfather’s club in D.C. and in my father’s club in Chicago), who theoretically have a sewing kit, and other oddments to help you out, but who really just glare at you and sniff loudly when you put any amount in their little dish.
I think of them as the undead-souls condemned to live out eternity for sins they committed in their lives…
They are really there to stop dudes from snorting blow off the sinks, peeing on the floor, or smoking. They help maintain a clean bathroom, as Brain Wreck pointed out.
And having worked in a very nice country club, I found the little nice-ities very useful at times. Having an electric shaver for when you forgot to shave, is a lifesaver.