New forward-sloping toilet created to reduce throne time of employees

December 19, 2019 • 2:45 pm

I don’t have anything against capitalism, though I like some socialism mixed in with it, but, by god, this invention is capitalism gone awry. It’s reported by Wired UK, and you can see it by clicking on the screenshot:

An excerpt:

We all appreciate the little things in life, and that includes spending five minutes on the toilet scrawling through Twitter on company time. But those days may be at risk with the StandardToilet, a seat that claims to drastically reduce toilet time.

Approved by the British Toilet Association (BTA), a members organisation that campaigns for better toilet facilities, the StandardToilet sits at a downward angle of 13 degrees. After around five minutes of sitting, this will cause strain on the legs, similar to a low level squat thrust, but “not enough to cause health issues,” reassures Mahabir Gill, founder of StandardToilet. “Anything higher than that would cause wider problems. Thirteen degrees is not too inconvenient, but you’d soon want to get off the seat quite quickly.”

It was inspired by a series of annoyances. As a consulting engineer for 40 years, Gill sometimes discover workers asleep on the toilet, and in his free time, was increasingly annoyed by queues for public toilets. The final straw came while he was shopping in a department store the morning after a particularly heavy night out, and in desperate need for a toilet, could only find locked cubicles. Thus, the idea for the StandardToilet was born.

Here, as shown by CBS News, is the nefarious new invention: the sloping toilet (the “StandardToilet” label is the company that makes it). To wit:

Well, by god, this is too damn much! There is something petty and nasty about installing sloping toilets so that your workers get uncomfortable after five minutes on the throne. But of course the company has a “good” reason:

However, the toilet isn’t entirely about curtailing bathroom breaks. The 13% downward slope of the toilet has health benefits, the company told CBS MoneyWatch. In its email, the company said the design “helps in reduction of risk in swollen hemorrhoids.”

What an altruistic reason: the company is concerned with its employees’ hemorrhoids!

If you’re going to go this route, why not just install an ejecting toilet seat that flings the user off after five minutes, and warn them of that? (If you want to be helpful, provide a timer.) After all, some people can endure leg pain better than others and will be prone to stay on the throne.

90 thoughts on “New forward-sloping toilet created to reduce throne time of employees”

  2. This really seems a solution in search of a problem. Does this guy think people actually want to spend extra time in a public toilet? I don’t like waiting in line either, but in the spirit of Hanlon’s razor (don’t attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence), I would not attribute a row of locked stalls as people intentionally taking their time/going slow.

    1. Yeah I wonder what his work Environment is like if he is going to realize so much productivity gain from not pooping as much.

        1. You can remove the magazines but that doesn’t help with the cell phone aka ‘network connected computer device able to access billions of porn videos’.

    2. I beg to differ. If you’re Larry Craig you definitely like to spend time in public toilets.

  3. Wait until someone slides off that toilet, cracks a kneecap, and sues the bastards.

    The jury will not look kindly on a company that forces those torture-toilets on its employees.

    1. Them existing at all is a flagrant violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act, which is why they will not be coming soon to the US (unless someone with a lot of money and little sense pays his legal department’s warnings no mind).

      So yeah, don’t even need to wait for an incident. As soon as these things are installed it’s lawsuit city.

    2. It would be amusing if the attorney for the plaintiff had them reenact the event in the court room. 😎

    3. This can be a real danger. I have had both knees replace and cannot bend my knees as far as 90 degrees. In a hotel near Atlanta, Ga, I had the bathmat under my feet while using the toilet. As I cannot simply stand up, I have to rather lurch my weight forward to get up. The mat slipped and I slid off the toilet seat, it was the closed circle kind, dragging my manhood under me and landing on the floor. My wife helped me up from the blood-streaked floor. I used a washrag to stop the bleeding and, as I was so embarrassed, the wife cleaned the floor, we checked out, and I drove to the emergency room where they put 10 stitches in my you know what. It had a good ending though. They discovered I have prostate cancer.

      3. Was it a teaching hospital? You could have … ehemm … entered the hallowed halls of Medical Student Mythology.
        It’s not a very satisfactory form of immortality, but someone has got to be that patient.

        My guilty secret – getting the remains of my foreskin caught in the metal-toothed zip of my coveralls, in the only toilet cubical in the changing room which didn’t have a door.

          1. Having no door helped. After hurling abuse, laughing uproariously, taking photos etc, someoen called the medic who came down with a can of spray-on “Ahhhhh” and a couple of pairs of forceps.
            He had a good laugh too.

      4. Two nurses in the ER were standing over me on each side of the gurney making a kind of sucking sound thru their teeth. I asked what that meant and they replied, “We are trying to show compassion.” I damn near fell off the gurney laughing.

      5. Jesus what a nightmare! I hope the prostate cancer was caught in early stages. A family friend is just starting radiation for that and I met many older men getting radiation when I had radiation for my own cancer a few years ago.

        1. Thank you for asking. I had 85 radiation treatments followed by two years of monthly Lupron shots and daily testosterone depression pills that ends on 31 March this new year. It seems that at age 79, when this began, I was too old for surgery here in the US of A. My numbers are excellent after being a 7 on the Gleason scale. Doctor gives me another five or six years. Age 81, I’ll take it.

  5. From the “killing two birds with stone department,” I heard that it’s good for the quads, which I need since I just had knee replacement . . . .

  6. “but, by god, this invention is capitalism gone awry.”

    This is a feature of capitalism not a bug. Capitalism plus human nature inevitably leads to this toilet. It doesn’t need a tweak it needs to be disrupted and it surely will be IMO. Sooner than most would imagine possible I figure.

    I can’t imagine getting any push-back on this. Y’all agree, right?

  7. You know, if you really want to insure a quick trip to the toilet, don’t put stalls around them. Just toilets only right there in public. In the old days in the military, you would see bathrooms like this. Wide open for all to view.

    Better yet, if you are familiar with the toilets in the far east. Often just a hole in the floor with a place on both sides for your feet. You will certainly minimize your time in these places. A bear in the woods has a better deal.

    1. “..a bear in the woods has a better deal.”

      How to Shit in the Woods, 4th Edition: An Environmentally Sound Approach to a Lost Art

      CDN$ 17.33
      1 used and new from CDN$ 17.33

      1. Publisher Ten Speed Press, 2011
        ISBN 1580083633

        The ISBN leads back to the same book. Not that I’m naturally suspicious.

        1. I might make a bet that I’m the only one here who actually owns a copy. Not that I needed it of course..??… But a prof is expected to have an answer to every query. Better to refer to that than a different holy book.

    1. When I saw this a couple of days ago, I thought of that. I was trying to estimate what “rise” would be needed.
      The riverbank should provide branches and stones n the right range. Just be careful to not scratch too deeply into the porcelain and trigger catastrophic fracturing of the whole … shebang.

  11. I’ve heard of lawyers doing similar things with chairs clients sit in. Evidently, the front legs are shorted about 1″. This makes for subliminal discomfort and encourages people to move along. Interesting.

    1. I seem to recall that many years ago McDonalds installed seats in their “restaurants” that were only comfortable for a short period of time so that they could accelerate the customer throughput.

      1. Sixty years ago a university friend of mine worked in summer for the railway up in remote
        Hornpayne, Ontario. Nothing to sit down on but blocks of ice. (This preceded much air conditioning.) Apparently this gave railway employees the world record for hemorrhoids.

        That could be an inventor’s idea for a new, similar torture e.g. hollow seats containing a frigid fluid.

        Or a new horror movie: “Invasion of the Hemorrhoidal Maniacs”

        I’m told that I got the genes for this stuff from my mother’s ancestry.

        I doubt the downward slope makes much difference, despite the claim.

    2. And I have been told that I never need to worry about a heart attack, as I am unqualified.

      Ah, love

  13. I may get some crap for this, but it seems likely that time on the loo has spiraled upward as people extend their #2 time in order to idly surf the web on their phones.

    1. Uncharitable bastard that I am, I suspect that you’re right.

      I really can’t get too worked up about this. The effort required to brace yourself against that minimal slope is probably less than the effort required to perform the intended function. The reason for providing a toilet is for public health and convenience, not for the public to take a rest break (notwithstanding the silly euphemism ‘rest room’, that’s not what it’s for!).

      cr

      1. It seems the formerly ubiquitous PUBLIC CONVENIENCE in Britain is disappearing fast. We males had a joke including the phrase ‘brick shithouse’ back here in Canada (I won’t relate the sexist phrase), but that’s exactly what they were when I got over there to Manchester in 1963.

        Surely Flanders&Swan must have had a song about them. They did have one mentioning the defunct Brit Rail station in Chorlton cum Hardy, where I lived. Much more recently there was an outdoor concert by somebody famous there, IIRC. I actually saw Flanders&Swan perform live in a London theatre back then.

        1. Lived in Chorlton, that is. They supported me well enough not to need to crash in an unused rail station.

  14. I recall a similar affront to people’s enjoyment of life from Australia many years ago. People were spending too much time on telephones in phone booths. It seems there was a tight limit on call handling capacity. Some creative engineer came up with the idea of adding weight to the handset to tire the arm of users and shorten calls. It seems to have worked.

  15. I honestly like this design as a step in the right direction. I don’t think it should be used to shorten time spent on the toilet, but I have read many times that the 90 degree angle we sit at is the least conducive to successful bowel movements. We are maximizing the strain on our organs and for some that have trouble, an angle would help. In fact, a position that is closer to standing may be the most natural position for a human to comfortably (physically) have a bowel movement.

    1. Not so seriously, surely the best is any position your body is in while running away from a large hungry tiger—our expression is ‘scared shitless’.

      More of an actual reply, surely exactly the opposite of upright is best, namely a deep squat. Those old southern Europe, western Mediterranean anyway, holes in the floor had the foot positions relative to the hole exactly that way, not the hole between your feet. I spent a few months in southern Spain in the early 1960’s and trust my memory on that.

      1. You can simulate a squat on a regular toilet by using a footstool to elevate your knees. It does help.

        1. Work on a vessel with most of the crew coming from third world countries (exemples I’ve experienced including Argentinians, Filippinos and Burmese/ Myanmarians (?) while the embargo was in place) and you’ll find that using a “sit upon” toilet as a squat toilet is normal.
          Yes, the plastic seat breaks. This doesn’t concern the squatters, who were wondering what it was for anyway.
          The first time I met it (a rig re-entering Europe from the Argentine) there were about 25 “public” toilets and not one had an unbroken seat.

    2. No, that’s terribly wrong. I will wager that you have not read the book mentioned under Comment 7.

      It is indeed a lost art to take a shit in the woods or anywhere else. Those of us who have had to rediscover that art on our own (why don’t they teach this in schools!!!!!????) will know that this tolet slopes in the wrong direction. It is the opposite of a healthy toilet. The natural shitting position is a squat.

      I’m an expert on this, believe me. There’ve been many occasions when I have lived half a year or more in forests with no toilets. That is plenty of time to experiment.

        1. Perhaps exCREriments.

          In my case, no serious work in the forests like Lou Jost. Mainly remote hiking, so important to keep stuff clean for the few others later and to minimize environmental damage.

          That question reminded me of something sounding a bit ominous, but it was 25 years ago, so it isn’t at all:

          Mainly for nordic ski training, but
          I did a few running races (very badly), I often did very long slow runs rurally away from traffic and people. Unknown to me then, I had developed a bowel cancer which never caused me psychological distress because it was discovered only during an operation which removed it entirely, of which I was always completely confident. (A burst appendix likely saved my life!) In any case, there were a few times running just before that where the ‘urge to purge’ came on very suddenly and uncontrollably. Fortunately the nearby ditches were deep and weed-filled enough to entirely hide me from the very few cars or Old Order Mennonite buggies that could have, but never did, pass by. The ‘practice’ from hikes was handy. And the squat had the ‘hiding’ advantage too!

          Very humorous to me, even then, and I trust to you. My true confessions. No negative after effects at all, my usual good luck. And the bad environmental effects washed away before reaching any real surface water.

        2. As long as scatological humour is the topic, my favourite (well maybe quantum theory foundations is marginally ahead), I had an incident about 20 years ago:

          One morning in late fall with a slight (white of course) ground snow covering, I looked out from my house to see a ‘black hole’ in the ground about 100 feet out there. Cannot remember if I immediately realized it was the septic tank—the concrete roof of it had collapsed (replaced with a good plastic one which should last 100 years). Anyway, I walked over to the edge of the hole to have a look down 5 or 6 feet at the debacle. After a short while I turned around and walked back towards the house, but heard a noise. Looking around, there was the hole, now twice as wide, the newly fallen-in part being exactly where I had just been standing.

          So bad luck, then good luck. Better e.g. to get splattered by a skunk, than to descend into the bowels of that particular bit of earth, so to speak.

          1. On my first HUET course, there was a Nigerian lad in the “red helmet” group – a non-swimmer. After one of several days in the pool we were chatting over an abysmal packed lunch and someone asked him why he’d never learned to swim. “We had a cess pit at the bottom of the garden, and I fell in.”
            OK, a sufficient reason.
            He passed the course, including the couple of hours of hypothermia practical of being thrown into the October North Sea in a boilersuit.

          2. Oh, and there’s a friend who had an attack of food poisoning a day and a bit into the Gouffre Berger. He had to be escorted out by another member of the party.
            20m up a 120m rope climb, the flow started. The escort was 5m below the patient. Both were using a “frog” rope ascent technique. Both were wearing waterproof oversuits, as the cave involved canals and waterfalls. The motion … pumps.
            They got married a year or so later.

          4. Thanks. With no fear of heights I love the mountains, but with slight claustrophobia not caves at all. But I guessed what it was, if not where.
            There are some pretty strange sexual perversions, but I’m confident the actualities of that incident had nothing to do with the subsequent marriage.

      3. Or, as a memorable piece of graffiti had it, ‘No use standing on the seat
        The crabs in this place jump six feet’

        😉

        cr

    1. Yes. Let’s see the bosses install them in their own fucking toilets if they’re so keen. With a monitor to stop people from abusing them

      1. It makes me think of the IT Crowd episode where Roy goes into the handicap toilets and Moss goes into the staff toilets at the theatre all because there is a toilet guy there and they couldn’t wee with him looking at them. The hilarity is in what follows.

        1. At my first office job, one of the older hands used to arrive in the office at about 8.30am for an 8.45 start. He would sit at his desk reading his Daily Record until 8.45, then quite deliberately check his watch, get up and go to the toilet, where he would sit reading his paper for the next 20 minutes.

  20. This is a kinder, gentler capitalism! See the book Void Where Prohibited: Rest Breaks and the Right to Urinate on Company Time (ILR Press Books), available on Amazon.

  21. Justifying these by reason of increasing worker productivity is a despicable.

    However, installing these in half the stalls might help those of us who find themselves in critical need of unoccupied stall. Of course more toilets is a better solution, but in lieu of that it might cut down on the times one has to spend more than 5 minutes of the squeeze and run searching for an open stall on other floors because everyone currently occupying a seat is reading “Why Evolution is True” and watching cat videos on their cell phone.

  22. I find it ironic that the most comfortable place I’ve sat and lied down is the dentist’s chair. I’ve thought of buying one so that I can enjoy it under less stressful circumstances.

      1. Ditto on the blood donation chairs. I’d love to have one in my living room. Much better than any regular reclining chair I’ve sat in.

  23. As a student, forty odd years ago, I worked summers in a local oil rig fabrication yard and it was not uncommon for “workers” to spend a goodly part of their shift slumbering peacefully in the toilets. In fairness they never missed a tea or lunch break though.

    2. An “old timer,” recalled to me the 30’s and the WPA (“We Piddle Around”) and the Civilian Conservation Corps:

      “Two a-comin’ and two a-goin,’
      Two a-shittin’ and two a-mowin.'”

  24. More useful would be some form of wall covering that has wiring in it to form a Faraday cage, to stop staff hiding in the loo playing on the phone or checking Tinder when they are supposed to be working.

    Incidentally, one of my daughters came up with a word for the SJWs at college: Marxiccist, as in Narcissist.

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