Archive for January, 2002

The Bathroom At My Office – 32nd Street

Posted in New York on January 3rd, 2002 by jcn

The bathroom on my floor as work is accessible only with a key, which serves to prevent the unwashed masses from using the facilites that are reserved for the unwashed privileged folks who need to pee in the course of a normal, coffee-fueled work day.

The men’s bathroom has both a standard urinal as well as a toilet in a stall. The first thing that should be noted about the stall is that it faces the door to the bathroom, which means that if the stall door happened to be open when another person entered the bathroom, then the first thing that said person would see would be the toilet stall. This does not seem like so much of a concern except to realize that there is no handle on the door to stall, requiring the occupant of the stall to pull the door shut by grasping on to the top edge of the door and pulling in closed. It is not always the case that the occupants of my floor have accomplished this task and on numerous occassions I have entered the bathroom to be confronted by more of my floormates than I ever would like to.

Assuming one is finally able to enter the stall (and pulls the door shut, as is only appropriate in such situations) one would note that the walls are rather narrow around the toilet. Looking down, one would note that there are ten and a half tiles between the walls. At two inches each, the stall measures just under two feet wide. While sitting on the toilet and feeling claustrophobic (escaping the stress of the work day) one is reminded of the story of William Taft who was so fat that he got stuck in the White House bathtub. One would consider this image (with a particularly large gentleman being stuck in a too-narrow toilet stall) amusing. One would be correct in this assessment.

The bathroom itself is fairly nice, being cleaned every day by a professional cleaning who replace the toilet paper and soap and urinal cakes on a semi-regular basis. There is, however, no hot water coming out fo the sink, shut off either to protect the folks at work from hurting themselves or to save money. The soap in the dispensers is of a particularly high quality (for public-ish soap), including just a touch of moisturizer and scent, it would appear. The paper towel dispenser is always stocked and contains product at least an entire step up from the brown paper towels of elementary school days of old.