The Office 4 (Conclusion): Watersports
Posted on | September 24, 2007 at 8:01 am | 5 Comments
This is the last in a series of entries about my move to a different office building for work.
The one area that really bugs me about the facilities in the new office building is the bathroom. Now, the men’s bathroom at the old building was no marvel – the urinal would frequently stop working and get backed up, and some of the toilets would also get stopped up and overflow from time to time. And it wasn’t lighted very well. And the paper towels were not well-stocked. The one at the new building doesn’t really have those problems, but it has others. Foremost among them is the faucets. The men’s bathroom on my floor has three sinks. All three have “timed” faucets, where you activate them with a lever or button (no motion sensors), and you get a burst of water for a second or two. Out of these three, there’s only one that’s really usable – one of the button-activated ones. (The “button” is on the tip of the faucet and you have to push it all the way down. The water stops when the button pops all the way back up.) The other button faucet is extremely loose; it’s not attached to the sink very well. So pushing the button down, which requires a lot of force, almost makes the whole thing come apart. It’s been that way since I started working there.
The third faucet/sink, the one with the lever, is even worse. It gives you two seconds of spray, but it’s very forceful spray with multiple streams, which ricochet off the sink bottom and all. It’s very hard not to get water all over you when using this faucet. Even the act of sticking your hand under the water flow causes the water to splash powerfully off your hand and onto your chest and face. It’s really bizarre.
And I really doubt these timed faucets save much water, since you end up having to continually reactivating them anyway. The old building had normal faucets.
And then there’s the toilets. They have a very powerful flush, which is something I need and admire. However, it’s a bit too powerful. (Water pressure doesn’t seem to be a problem in this building!) The water ends up swirling around the rim and some of it inevitably shoots out of the bowl and onto the floor and/or your pants. I’ve learned to flush as the very last part of the toileting operation, so that I can vacate the stall quickly without getting hit by a stream of toilet water. Luckily, there’s a drain on the floor, so the water that shoots out doesn’t stick around much. And the urinals seem to be okay.
Conclusion
Though I don’t really mind a change of scenery and was getting a bit bored with the old building, the extra commute puts this move into the negative category for me. Although it’s far better than having to commute up to Boulder, so I’m grateful that my team was allowed to move downtown instead and that there’s covered parking. The winter will tell the tale. If we have another one like last winter, with bad storms practically every week, I’m really not going to enjoy the commute. Hopefully I’ll be able to work from home on those bad snow days. (As a general rule, I don’t like working from home, but that’s a topic for another blog entry.) So, I wish we didn’t have to move at all, but since we did, this is probably the best possible outcome.
Pet Peeve Of The Day: Attending my first Broncos game in years (and the first one with N) and watching them play so badly and lose a home game to a team that’s probably not that great. At least we got to see Terrell Davis inducted into the Ring of Fame.
Latre.
Comments
5 Responses to “The Office 4 (Conclusion): Watersports”
September 24th, 2007 @ 5:37 pm
I think our facilities manager is sanitation-mad.The latest thing is free-standing hand-sanitizing stations scattered through the workspace — but *almost everything* in the men’s room is motion-activated, which drives me bananas. The toilets sometimes flush when you’re not done at all, which is often quite startling. In the mornings (maybe when the air is cooler/heavier? I have to move verry slowly to change out of my bike clothes w/o making the thing flush 3 or 4 times, even if I’m not very close to it. (I don’t have the same problem in the evening, oddly.) The paper towel dispensers dispense when you take a towel and/or wave at them, but there’s a delay that’s just long enough that the constant parade of new hires get double towel servings, which eventually leads to jammed cannibal towel machine slurping down its own output.
But the piece de resistance are the soap dispensers. One is so determinedly onanistic that whenever anyone makes the mistake of filling it, it spurts and spurts soap down the side of the basin until it can spurt no more. The result is that the people using that basin never wash their hands with soap. The one thing that’s *not* automated is the door, so all the sanitation efforts, er, go out the window.
Also, while we’re on pet peeves, the guys who use the men’s room barefoot _freak me out_.
September 24th, 2007 @ 9:33 pm
Onanistic soap dispensers – that’s the funniest thing I’ve heard all day.
Going barefoot in the men’s room is not right.
September 25th, 2007 @ 12:22 am
Those kind of faucets are a true peeve of mine. How the frickin hell are you supposed to wash your hands with one second of water available only if your other hand is pushing down the control? You’re right, too: it uses more water because more water gets wasted (and, typically, sploshed all over the place).
The key with motion-sensitive soap dispensers is placement. That, and the soap shouldn’t be so liquid that it jets out several feet: I was in a place once that nearly blipped soap right at my trousers. It would have been fun explaining that one…
September 25th, 2007 @ 8:41 am
How the frickin hell are you supposed to wash your hands with one second of water available only if your other hand is pushing down the control?
Actually, the timed ones with the button don’t require you to keep the button held down with one hand. Well, not unless you want to have more than the alloted two seconds. But I have to amend my original post – the faucet with the lever is not timed, and only works when you’re pushing on the lever. So it does require you to keep one hand on the lever to get any water at all. And that, as you pointed out, is ludicrous.
September 25th, 2007 @ 6:12 pm
Luddites. You can’t stand in the way of progress! Don’t even try, or its motion-activated machine guns will shoot the guy next to you.