A few years ago, I started making mental notes of which public toilets women use most.
You know, you're occupying a cell and someone, without looking, jiggles the door, giving you quite the moment of terror as you're rousted from your private efforts to double check that the door bolt is holding.
And I've noted that there are definitely some doors that are more likely to be disturbed than others.
Take for example, the first couple of doors- these seem to be very popular- but which door seems to depend on the particular bathroom.
And why is that?
Is it that it is more natural to continue your U turn into the bathroom at a certain radius? Or is it that we more naturally prefer the first pot? And then there's the habitual marking aspect that needs to be taken into account- once you go there and it was clean, you're more likely to return to that pot, right? Even though it's a public pot and it's got an equal share of the action, as it were?
I'd love to see a sociological experiment on this: Toilets starting at different distances from the entry wall to see which toilets are used more vs. which door count vs. the angle of the turn you have to make to enter the pot...
It might actually help us understand how many pots should go into a bathroom....
...but the answer is "always one more" in the women's.
Mythbusters tested this May 2013: Stall Number 1[edit]
ReplyDeleteIn a public restroom, the bathroom stall closest to the entrance is used the least often and contains the least amount of bacteria.
Confirmed
After 119 different men used a restroom with four bathroom stalls that had been freshly cleansed of all bacteria, Adam and Jamie swabbed each of the stalls and counted the number of colonies of bacteria produced. The stalls, numbered in order from the closest to the entrance (as 1) to the farthest (as 4), had 162, 267, 290 and 231 colonies, respectively. In addition, a tally of the users of each stall showed that the stalls were used by 23, 38, 34 and 24 people, respectively.
Yes!
ReplyDeleteBut they needed to take it a step further. They proved that in this particular bathroom, the first stall was used the least. But the bigger question is:
Is that always the case?
What affects the outcome? Is it thinking that one is cleaner than the other? Is it the radius angle of turning? Is it habit? They needed to take it further and test with many different bathroom layouts and see if that really is the case. Because I know if the women's, if I use the first or second hole, I will most likely be interrupted.
So, is it a gender thing?!
Is it a time of day thing? Like mornings are busier for the first stall than the end of the day? Is it affected by holidays?
I see a whole thesis here on use of bathroom stalls...