Is Urinals.
Now, I know what you're thinking. "I know these extremely useful and functional pieces of brilliant engineering," you say to yourself. How useful are they? Why, so useful they can't be done without. A school I went to made a habit of switching the floors every year, so that one year men would be on the even floors, women on the odd floors and vice versa the following year. This had the benefit of reducing wear and tear on the building (given the rowdy nature of boys), but had an unintended side effect: on half of the years in question you'd have men with bathrooms that had no urinals, and women with bathrooms that had these otherwise masterful works of form and function. While the men lamented in lines waiting for a stall to open up as his buddy horked his lungs out, the women found a new use for their unique additons: They used the porcelein poetry as a flower pot. That's right. A flower pot. It worked pretty well too. Not only did you have orchids and dandelions and whatever else could be planted, there was no need to water them either- all one had to do was flush, and their potted potty was watered for the day!
But there is a dark side to this wonder of ingenuity. A side which causes every man pain and suffering.
There are basically three types of urinals: The trough, the built in and the wall fixture. The former two aren't as common anymore, but you will still find troughs at local stadiums around the country. The thought is pretty simple: when you decide you need to drain the main vein, you walk into the latrine, unzip and squeeze into a line breast crowd of other men, touching each other, bumping into each other and climbing over each other the same way you'd see hogs trying to eat their morning breakfast. The built in is a step up. It doesn't stick out like the trough, and offers a semblance of privacy so you can avoid the constant voluntary/involuntary fondling and pecker peeping you get at the trough. True, you still have to look out for that nefarious scoundrel that wants a gander at your gonads, but now you have a set distance between you, and hopefully some kind of divider, which makes life much more bearable. This style is also an older one, and seems to be disapearing largely from at least my neck of the woods. The basic preise is, you have a urinal, several feet tall, built in to the wall, and goes all the way down to the floor.
FInally, there is the wall fixture. While I have not research the finer points of urinal engineering, I'm pretty sure I know how this one came about. Some brilliant general at the urinal plant decided that there was a better way to pee and increase revenues, enter the wall fixture. Some no name, who probably has his own private bathroom at work, so he's never had to pee en communicado in his life decided that all the materials that went onto making the built in models was a waste. He also knew that he couldn't go back to the ways of the old trough design and all the man-handling that came with it. So he went for the fixture method. The fixture is like the coach seating of urinal design. It'sw much smaller than the built in models, and is held to the wall much like you'd hang a painting, or a small shelf. It sits a couple feet off the ground, or less and from it's bottom to its top is most likely a couple feet tall. While this product does, on paper at least, conserve resourses, while offering some sense of privacy you found in the built in models, there are drawbacks: With the first to models you are limited to one axis to aim on (vertical axis on the trough and horizontal on the built in), i.e., all you have to worry about on the trough is aiming too high or too low, whichs brings to another flaw in the trough design; HOW MANY OF US HAVE GONE IN THE TROUGH AND HAD SOMEONE ELSE PEE ON YOUR FRIGGEN HANDS?!?!?!?!?
the problem with the wall fixture untis is as follows:
1) while conserving resources, people tend to go overboard in design and will conveniently leave out little things like dividers between you and your fondling friend leaking coolant next to you. Add on top of this that space is attmepted to be conserved as well, so you are now as close as you would be with the other pigs at the trough.
2) The introduction of the second axis, and confining the aim to a small area, leaving more chance to miss, and
3) The need to apparently cowtow to midgets because the damn things are too friggin low!! Seriously, I go into a bathroom with these in there (preferrably when I'm alone, cause I don't want some dude leaning over for a peak at my little buddy), and where does it hang? you guessed it; right next to the flush handle. The only way for me to aim inside the urinal is to squat on my haunches, and hope it doesn't swing into my own filth as I fill the basin. Why should I even bother? I think that's why no one ever flushes the damn things- their wangs are hanging by the flush handle too, so they just go all over it, not even bothering to try to hit the target, because it' obviously wasn't made for me to aim at, it was made for some two foot tall elf or dwarf orhobbit, or whatever the hell you call them.
What is the point to all this you ask? Simple, we need to go back to the days of the built in models, and reclaim the glory days before prepackaged meat handling. Call your congressman, and tell him/her to create some urinal legislation for all us poor pee deprived people!!
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