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PaperclipPerfector  12d ago (text post)   32006 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 14, 2025

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Years ago my big tech employer did a terrible job at planning restrooms in a new building we moved in. They didn’t accommodate for how male skewed we are and ended with a situation where the ratio of women to fixtures was something like 5:1 and for men it was around 50:1.

Every time I needed a toilet I found myself bouncing to different floors to find an unoccupied stall.

In one corner of one floor we had layout where there was a multi occupant men’s room with a urinal and a stall, and a single occupant ladies room. To try to ease the pain on overcrowded men’s rooms the company made the single occupant women’s room into a gender neutral bathroom.

A number of women raised hell about the message that sends to women. Never mind that women virtually never have to wait for a free toilet while the men constantly do. The women’s feelings on the matter were more important, and the sign was changed back.

Some of the many times I've audibly said "Thank God I'm a guy," have been when emerging from a toilet to see my wife still in a very long line of women waiting to enter one.

I have no idea how much money my former employer wastes on toilet queuing time for men. The endless bouncing around from floor to floor trying to find an open stall. Apparently OSHA requires a certain number of toilets for a given employee count of either sex; when it's in the double digits, it's around 20 employees/toilet, but when it's in the triple, it increases to around 40/toilet.

At least we got to read weekly educational flyers posted in the bathroom about Testing on the Toilet (alongside other flyers asking engineers to remember to flush...)

At Facebook our version of this was called The Weekly Push and typically was promoting some new dev tooling.

I miss those days, I don’t think the name would get past our censorious overlords now.

For a time Google HQ was actually in violation of the toilet rules and had to bring in portable toilets, which is kinda funny for a company which is known for its good working environment. They couldn't even manage to stay in compliance with rules meant to take harsh factory conditions from "dystopian" to "slightly less so".

At least we got to read weekly educational flyers posted in the bathroom about Testing on the Toilet (alongside other flyers asking engineers to remember to flush...)

Is it something about engineers, or just people in general? We had signs plastered everywhere in the bathrooms reminding our engineers "don't flush things down the toilet that aren't toilet paper, you know how often it breaks and that's the cause, what's wrong with you?"

In actual-hire-out-of-the-probation-office factories they don’t have signs saying remember to flush(although they do have signs saying not to spit your gum in the toilet, only use the bathroom proper for your sex, etc) or to avoid flushing things other than tp in the men’s room(although they do in the women’s- specifically due to menstrual products). So yeah, possibly engineer specific.

Oh, no, they have “stop flushing the fucking paper towels” in the factories, too. At least it’s a sign they know how to flush it, I guess.

The flyers, from experience, are both needed and unheeded. And the floors heavier in engineering are worse about it.

Maybe I've just worked in small-medium, high-trust (engineering, office) workplaces, but most of the signs I've seen in bathrooms are about upcoming blood drives and security policies (beware phishing). If I have seen such signs, they were at least not terribly memorable.

I work in a... medium? (Maybe 1000-ish people per location per city; no building above three or four stories) that's insanely high trust (vetted engineers) and yet...

My tech company had the same thing. 20 men and 2 women, one loo for each. The women’s loo used to have ‘men may use in an emergency’ sign but it got taken down.

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