Saturday, April 16, 2016

Why do we still have urinals?

I'm sure you've all seen both of these things before.  Usually not in the same stall like that, because most men's bathrooms are apparently designed with creeps who want to peek on other people's crotchy-parts in mind rather than those who want to just walk in pee in peace... but you've seen both of them before.  On the upper-left is a toilet.  In the lower-right is a useless piece of porcelain garbage.

Also known as a urinal.

(For any aliens or far-future time-travelers may be reading this, a urinal is like a toilet that's hung on a wall and can only be used for peeing.  I'm sure they don't have them where(/when) you're from.)

Anyway... urinals suck.  They're just... utterly pointless.  Any peeing that could be done in a urinal could just as easily be done in a toilet, and in a men's bathroom it's less likely that the toilet seat will be down (well, unless your area's experiencing an outbreak of La Diarrea del Diablo, of course), so those who are too lazy to adjust the seat from one position to the other won't have to put forth the tiny amount of effort required to lift it up.  (All those who have an opinion on which way the seat "should" be positioned when nobody's using it, that means you... yes, both seat-uppers and seat-downers, you're both equally wrong, the correct answer to "seat up or down?" is "who cares?"  Unless you're concerned with poo particles flying across the room upon the toilet flushing, in which case you sort of have a point, sometimes, maybe.  It's still probably not a big enough deal to make a big fuss about, but you lid-closed-if-there-even-is-a-lid people are at least not idiots like the "seat up! no, seat down!" crowd.)

Heck, any peeing that could be done in a urinal could be done better in a toilet.  With a toilet you can choose either to sit or stand depending on the configuration of your genitals, your need to poop as well as pe, or just how you're feeling that day.  With a toilet there's no risk of being splashed by your own pee no matter how close you stand (unless you're somehow blasting it into the toilet with firehose-level force, in which case see a doctor) and there's also no risk of exposing yourself to random creepy strangers if you try to stand back far enough to avoid splashing yourself with your own pee.  Why in the world do bathroom-builders think it's okay to have those tiny little "almost" dividers between urinals, or worse yet, no divider at all?  Do they think people come into bathrooms specifically to expose themselves to others, or what?  Are bathrooms designed by creepy people who love waving their dongers just barely within sight of others, hoping that somebody will accidentally catch a glimpse as they turn to leave the bathroom?

And speaking of creepy people, nobody peeks under toilet stalls to say hello, but for some reason all kinds of creeps find it perfectly acceptable to turn their heads and talk to others while standing, pants unzipped and pee flowing, in front of a urinal.  WHY DO PEOPLE THINK THIS IS OKAY? It's awkward and honestly kind of disturbing.  Among family members or something, sure, talking when one person is busy doing bathroom things might not be too horribly bad.  But I don't want some random dude talking to me when I'm peeing -- or worse, when he's peeing -- and I hope everyone reading this is sane enough to agree.

Also... with a toilet you get stalls.  You can close the door when you poop (or pee.)  There's no people walking behind you as you pee (or in front of you as you poop... but don't poop in a urinal, please.)  Privacy is a thing that exists with toilets.  Toilets are safe places.  If somebody wants to mess with you while you're in the toilet they basically need to break in, unless they're either so tiny they can squoonch themselves under the stall along the floor or they're Spider-Man or something so they just climb up over the top.  Urinals, on the other hand, are the ghetto back alley of the bathroom.  There's no hiding places.  You want to go in and out as quickly as possible just in case.  You never know when somebody might come up behind you and stab you (or say hello while you're in the middle of taking a leak, depending on the type of sketchy person involved.)

A urinal doesn't even take up that much less space than a small toilet stall.  Position the toilet paper dispenser correctly (in other words, not the way the smaller stalls in Wal-Mart do, with the dispenser so low to the ground that you have to put forth a serious effort to keep your legs from uncomfortably bumping into it if you're any bigger than maybe 5'02") and you could probably just barely wedge in two small-sized stalls in place of two or three urinals and some of the empty space that surrounds them.

Urinals are obsolete.  And not in the "this new thing came out so the old one is obsolete" sense, like how the smartphone zombies think older styles of cellphones are (they're wrong by the way; until they make a smartphone that flips closed and has the option of buttons rather than just touch-screen, regular phones will never be truly obsolete), but just universally less useful than another thing that already exists.  Kinda like some of the dumber internet slang words, pretty much.  I'd honestly rather have a freaking outhouse toilet than an indoor-plumbing urinal.

Why the heck do we still have urinals??

1 comment:

  1. Maybe because they save money? Then, we can just have fewer stalls.

    To be honest, I like squat toilets better. They take up less space, use less water, and work just as well. Personally, I feel more comfortable squatting above a hole than sitting on a seat used by several people.

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