I got a mass email today at work regarding the urinals in the men’s restroom. Basically this memo was instructions on how to use the toilet properly. No, this wasn’t a joke; apparently people were having a few issues…
I would just paste the email here in the post, but I think that might be a breach on the code of ethics.
It was a very funny email indeed and gave me quite the chuckles, which is always a nice start to my late morning arrival at work after my 8am Discrete Mathematics course.
So here are the details…
:: The urinals in the men’s room are auto flush
:: This means they will flush when you walk away (or are suppose to at least)
:: There is a manual flush that will guarantee the flush if for some reason the auto flush fails
:: This means there are two methods to flush… there lies the problem…
Apparently some men would push the manual flush button while backing away from the urinal, causing both the flushes to activate. Also, apparently the urinal is stupid and then tries to use twice the amount of water to refill… causing spillage.
I don’t know about the women’s room… but when there is spillage in the men’s room, especially right beneath the urinal… I generally do not assume it is just water. Any liquid on the floor of the men’s room is treated like a deadly, radioactive carcinogen and carefully avoided. Your mind just starts to wander… how in the world could a dude miss the toilet by that much!?! …
And so after reading this email… of course what do I want to do? Run to the men’s room to see if there is truth to this tale and try to overflow the toilet just by flushing! Of course there may not be any listing in the Kroger Code of Ethics about toilets overflowing… but that might be destruction of company property… and it would be quite the conflict of interest to destroy property of the company that I have stock in.
And now the computer programmer in me is itching the question… should not the toilet manufacturer have tested this? Toilets are fairly simple mechanisms, no? Would it not have been a simple test to see if you can mess with the flushing system? Would it not have been simple to set a switch so that when the manual flush has been enabled, the eye to detect the auto flush is disabled? And same with the reverse where when the auto flush has been enabled, a switch is flipped to disable the manual flush?
Oh the craziness of the toilet industry…
In other news, I have a new million dollar idea… well… sorta. I have a topic in mind, but the exact innovation is yet to reach conception. I’ll give you a little preview… it has to do with water! More on that later though!
See ya!