Baffling Bathrooms

I've been meaning, for a while, to write about the bathrooms in the building where I work. They're not anything special, but they have a few quirks.

First of all, there are actually two (maybe three) "shower rooms" in the hallway on my floor. No. Not emergency showers or anything, but actual "I've had my yoga class, now I need to rinse off" showers. When I started working here, I thought those were simply handicapped bathrooms (they have the "accessible" logo on the doors), so I walked into one one afternoon. What I found was a bathroom-sized room with a bench on one side and a curtained-off shower on the other. Nothing else. Some days, on my way down the hallway to the office, I hear the water running as I go by. It unnerves me just a little for no apparent reason.

In the actual bathrooms, the building is trying to be all environmentally and public-health conscious. They've got "no touch" paper towel dispensers. They've got (on some floors, not all floors) hands-free faucets. And they've got the kind of hand sanitizer dispensers that you don't have to touch to get squirted. I understand all of those things. I even understand their latest upgrade: Automatic lights.

But I also have a problem with the Automatic lights.

You see, for them to record motion throughout the bathrooms, the sensors have to be put where they can register the whole room. This means that -- at least in the men's rooms -- the sensors are all the way at the back of the room away from the door. That's not a real issue when you're in the room, but if you walk in and the lights are off, it can be a problem.

If the lights are off (they're timed, so they shut off after so many minutes), you have to walk into the dark room and kind of take a leap of faith that you're not going to trip over anything as you wait for the sensor to trigger. The one on our floor isn't too bad. If you walk in and wave your arms in front of you before the door closes, you're pretty much good to go. The one on the next floor up can be a problem, though. Up there, the bathroom is long and narrow, and the sensor is all the way at the back. If you walk in just far enough to wave your hands around, nothing happens. You have to let go of the door and walk about 3 more feet before the sensor finds you.

Now, I'm happy to say that the bathrooms in this building are pretty clean. But, really, who wants to walk that far into any dark room?

Let's just hope they don't put timed sensors in the shower rooms. I would not want to be the person who is plunged into naked darkness just because he needed to rinse a little longer.