I work at a university where there are co-ed bathrooms. I also work at a university that prides itself on being green\sustainable\progressive etc…so people generally don’t carry water bottles they use a sig or kleen canteen and they generally turn the lights off when leaving a room, including a bathroom.
Without the gory details - I was doing my business in a stall - there was one more person in the bathroom [who obviously didn’t know I was there] when “the other” person left he shut the lights off. There are no windows in this bathroom, so it was pitch-black dark! I obviously could not just stand up at the moment and turn them on so one thing led to another and a couple minutes passed and just as I got up to leave the lights came on as a young woman, perhaps 23, walked in. I unlatched the door and walked out right as the lights came on to her surprise there I was, deer in headlights coming out of a stall in a bathroom she thought was empty WITH the lights off.
In and of itself this is not really a big deal, however, I was teaching orientation in about ten minutes and guess who walked into orientation and sat down…yep, 23 year old young lady. Again, deer in headlights look on her face when she saw me as her teacher. I was slightly surprised at her demeanor as I thought it was no big deal…
The kicker - when I got to the part of orientation where I describe that the bathrooms are co-ed she let out a huge sigh and giggled a bit. The other participants in orientation looked at her and she just pointed at me and giggled a bit more.
From the student’s point of view, a guy was lurking in the dark in the ‘female’ washroom who then turned out to be her instructor. Only when she found out that the washrooms are coed did she relax.
In high school I once had a teacher turn the lights out on me and lock me in the boys’ restroom. My school had a couple of sets of restrooms; during lunchtime all of them were locked except for the ones adjacent to the cafeteria (they later switched to only having those two open all day). The teacher who’s class room was nearest to the restroom was responsible for locking it. This particular one was kinda off in a corner so nobody would pass by it unless they were going outside for a fire drill. I was stuck in there for 3 lunch periods. :mad: On the plus side I did miss a math test that I didn’t have to make up (my math teacher was the one who locked my in).
I worked at a place that had motion sensor lights on the floor, and they’d go off after a ridiculously short time - like five minutes or something. When things got quiet in there with everyone grunting away over their computers, the lights would keep turning off. It got so people got in the habit of waving a hand around in the air periodically just to keep the lights on.
I don’t know about you, but when something hits me by surprise, it takes me a bit to think of what I should do. And, by then, the person is usually long gone.
Yes, I have had it happen to me. Only recently did the vocal response become automatic.
Seriously… I’ve never heard of such a thing… I’m flabbergasted at the mere notion of it. Unisex bathrooms designed for only one occupant at a time, sure, but true co-ed restrooms? Really?
They had co-ed restrooms at a Catholic school in northern Quebec in the early 1980s. And the boys had a trough like urinal in that very same bathroom. This would have been a junior high or equivilent.
Us up-tight Ontarian Protestant sort of kids were all kind of shocked.
My first school (“the nuns”) was co-ed for preschool, with the boys moving over to the Jesuits starting on first grade. The kiddie bathrooms were co-ed, each classroom had its own (has, the building is now used by the city as a general-purpose building). Other bathrooms in the building were co-ed by virtue of all having stalls anyway, not that you were very likely to run into a male over age 5 who didn’t wear a black dress.
The year I was in 3rd grade, the two schools performed a rearrangement by which the Nuns became co-ed until 8th grade and the Jesuits became co-ed 9-12; the Nuns closed the building which had housed the lower grades and we all moved over to their original building.
The only bathrooms which weren’t coed were those in the gym at the Nuns (by virtue of sex-segregated changing rooms) and those under the Aula Magna at the Jesuits (by virtue of said aula serving as a movie theater and thus being required to have separate bathrooms). I understand that at some point someone tried to make a fuss about the co-ed bathrooms but didn’t have a legal foot to stand on, since there were separate facilities available for the fussy and the co-ed ones were all stalls.
A University I used to work at had a lecture theatre like that. It was always fun when they tried to hold exams in there - 40 students sitting still scribbling away, suddenly plunged into pitch darkness…
Ha ha ha! Our company bathrooms have this same lovely feature, and reading along (especially the part about “everyone grunting away”) I thought, Wow, this happens to someone else too then? Then I got to “computers” and realized you weren’t talking about your restrooms.
Our bathrooms at work have this obnoxious energy-saving feature whereby the goddam lights go out after 3 minutes (yep, brought in a stopwatch and timed it).
Sometimes it takes longer than 3 minutes, amiright? I live in mortal fear that I’ll forget to wave periodically, the lights will go out, then someone will come in before I can wave the lights back on again, and whoever comes in will see that one stall is occupied, indicating that I’ve been sitting here in the dark. Then I’ll just have to live in that stall forever, and never come out.
