In an effort to dissuade employees from taking long bathroom breaks, a British company has patented a toilet with a non-horizontal surface:
It seems to me like, more and more, the things that humans created to serve them (corporations, especially), are demanding unreasonable service from humans.
Whatever the UK version of the ADA is will be all over that. At least if that was in the US, I can almost guarantee no one would install those for fear of getting hit with a lawsuit almost immediately.
Here’s my suggestion to employees. Don’t brag about how much time you spend/waste in the bathroom. At least for me, hearing my employees talk about how they get paid for about 40 hours per year for time they spend in the bathroom really irks me.
We (business owners/employers/managers) know that people find ways to waste time at work. But when you brag about how you do it, it’s hard to look the other way.
Calm down there, Grinch. You do realize that 40 hours a year calculates out to about 48 minutes a week, or 9.6 minutes per day, right?
That’s well within the amount of time I’d think is perfectly reasonable to pee 2-3 times a day and take a dump somewhere in there as well. If anything, it’s on the short side.
The inventor doesn’t seem to have taken into account that women often have to spend longer in the bathroom.
Do they have to spend a longer time sitting on the toilet?
I know exactly what it works out to because I hear them saying (and I quote) “I wait until I get to work to take a shit so I get paid for it” and then doing the math and talking about how it’s like getting a weeks pay just for being in the bathroom. I have no issue with people using the bathroom, I have an issue when it turns into a game to see how much time they waste in there.
Also, if it makes a difference, this isn’t a big corporate place, it’s just a small business with about 15 employees, many of them being high school kids.
There are various female things they need to do sitting down, as I have been given to understand.
If you’re in the bathroom to screw around anyway, it’s not as though you need to sit to scroll through Twitter on your phone. So people who need to actually use the toilet get to suffer and the boogeymen slackers can lean against the wall and continue to slack.
God help the poor janitorial staff that has to clean up the mess this “invention” will create.
I’ve heard of other so-called efficiency toilets for employees. Stuff like timers on stall locks, or using an entry card which create an actual log (pun intended) of “down time” on the toilet.
I call bullshit. I can’t see where any employer would spend that kind of money to eke out a higher productivity from the staff. Instead, employees would be using work time to devise nefarious ways to sabotage the little tricks.
~VOW
So you’re pissed that they are waiting to take a dump on company time, to the tune of 10 minutes a day? You don’t sound like a fun guy to work for, if that’s the level of nitpickery you’ve descended to.
If they’re getting their jobs done adequately, why do you care?
No, he’s pissed that they’re bragging about it. I probably would be too. It’s petty and immature.
40 hours year is still about $500 per year, per employee that does it, that’s money that that ultimately comes out of the owners pocket or gets passed on to customers.
But, regardless of that, I specifically said I know it happens I try to look the other way, my issue is when people are bragging about it. I’m not fond of walking into (or being part of) a discussion about HOW to waste time.
Similarly, when myspace started getting popular and more and more people had camera phones, I mentioned to a few people over the years that if they’re going to go in the bathroom, take a selfie, post it to myspace and walk back out…maybe don’t do that when you’re (myspace/facebook) friends with the boss.
Well, for starters, they’re hourly. If they have nothing to do, they can ask me and I can find something for them to do or send them home early if it’s a slow day. Second, this is what they do instead of doing their job.
Here’s a different example of something similar I had to talk to one of my employees about. There’s another part of our building that’s remote enough that if I send someone over there to get something, I can expect it to take them 5-10 minutes to get there and back. One of my employees liked doing that because she could sneak in a cigarette. That’s fine. What wasn’t fine was when she told me how she would purposely ‘forget’ something (ie I’d ask her to get 2 boxes and she’d come back with 1) so she’d have another ten minutes to sneak in another cigarette. This was multiple times a day, every day. She was making $15.00/hr, so purposely coming up with excuses, say, twice a day, translates to about $25 a week that we paid her to smoke (not counting lunch breaks).
And again, I know people do it, I can live with that. But when people are bragging about it, they kind of force my hand. When that girl told me about how she purposely ‘forgets’ things so she could smoke, I couldn’t send her over there anymore.
PS, I’m running a family business and most of my employees are 20+ years younger than me. I rarely so much as see them outside of work. Being a fun co-worker isn’t a priority. I have to walk the line between not being overly harsh but also making sure everything gets done, which it doesn’t when everyone has their face buried in their phone all day.
I got pissed off at the smokers at one job being given something like an additional half an hour a day of breaks over us nonsmokers [they would flash a cigarette pack at the floor sup and he would let them go outside to smoke] that I bought one of those cigarettes in the glass vial from the geedunk and would flash it at him and walk out at about the same frequency as one of the other smokers. He wrote me up and I pointed out to the manager that he was letting smokers randomly out for a cigarette break in addition to the normal breaks, and I wanted the same privaleges. I got the write up discarded and no more smoke breaks for anybody. When the others got shirty with me, I pointed out they were cheating everybody that had to take their calls when they were outside smoking. The only fair thing was to give everybody the same number of breaks, which they did by removing the smoke breaks. I started handing out nic gum to the worse of the complainers.
I recently left an employer who tracks employees by key card. When do you show up to work, when do you go home (do neither outside of a five minute window surrounding your scheduled arrival/departure time), what time do you badge yourself into and out of the bathroom–and which bathroom, and you will be asked why if it’s not the closest one to your workstation, when do you badge yourself into and out of the work area. This is not some super secret facility, it’s just an unremarkable corporate cube farm. I can totally see them spending the time and money on these toilets.
That’s horrifying. Talk about a leadership failure, if they have to resort to bugging people about which bathroom they use.
And I’m assuming cube farm = salaried professionals?
As long as you’re not keycarded at stockrooms, you can still screw in there. Bathrooms? Ick…
Given that women more or less have to sit on the toilet to either piss or shit, whereas generally men only sit to shit, the answer would seem to be “yes”.
Except, of course, for the women who “hover”, for whom this new sloping toilet will not require any change in bathroom habits.
I anticipate toilets with such toilets will be even more disgusting than those with horizontal toilets, either through users venting their anger or the puzzling and amazing lack of coordination already apparent in public toilets.
For people complaining about this design, maybe stay away from Asia.
Yup–claim adjusters. Same job 30 years ago came with a car, a reasonable workload, and a 40 hour week (structured as you pleased to accommodate customer needs/visits). They got rid of the cars and chained everyone to a telephone when they figured out nobody was getting work done while they were staring at their windshields. Some efficiencies were lost when they gave up the personal contact, but the bottom line still improved. Now employees routinely do 50-60 hour weeks on a salary, which works out to just a smidge over minimum hourly wage in some places. And while they still only require a 5 day work week, those are not usually contiguous days. It’s all about letting the employee know who has the power now, not much to do with efficiency. Torture toilets? Just the ticket–do they come in chilled steel?