So my department and engineering shares bathrooms. Which isn't a problem except engineers like to browse their phones forever while taking a dump. And they refuse to exit a stall until the bathroom is empty. Because engineers.
Now I'm doing a shit load of annual reports so I don't have time like that. I decide to walk the extra 50 yards to accounting and see how their bathroom etiquette is.
spoiler (click to show/hide)
It was a very empty bathroom.
Way, WAY back in the day, I worked at a company which occupied the 5th and 6th floors of a building. Dev had the 6th floor, and reception, HR, sales, marketing, facilities, the largest conference room, and the main kitchen were on the 5th. Each floor had one men's room and one women's room. The women's room had two stalls, the men's had a single stall and a urinal.
The 5th floor had less people in general, and about an even split between men and women. The 6th floor had 80 employees, 6 of whom were women. In short, the men's room on 6 was just an olfactory nightmare where the remains of solace and dreams went to die. An hour after lunch was some Mad Max level stench dystopia.
I mentioned it to HR, who dithered for a bit and then decided to add an air freshener. The day I noticed the new "solution," I committed an email to the Everyone mail-list which marked me for life, for better or worse.
Apparently I was the first person to have done the math, and figured out that
74 males cannot
share a single sit-down stall, and assume that regular environment control will have any effect on it. An air freshener trying to cover the smell with perfume simply results in the smell of perfumed dooky. Further, there was just one tiny fan trying its best to circulate out the air from there, air tainted by the bowels of over six dozen men of a relatively sedentary lifestyle. I recommended that the turbine from a decommissioned jet be suspended in an inverted orientation above the toilet, to provide greater airflow out and away from the stall. Alternately, possibly the women could see their way fit to use the 5th floor women's room, and let the 6th floor restrooms be more representationally distributed.
In the end, the 6th floor restroom was made unisex, though women tended to use their 5th floor option nearly exclusively after that.