American toilets

[Marcus Houlden]

On Sun, 27 Aug 2006 07:24:47 +0100, Linz wrote the following to uk.misc:

Probably best to make sure you can't see into the bathroom from the street first though.

mh.

[Huge]

Pah. I know of a Local Authority that closed all its public conveniences twenty years ago.

[Mary Fisher]

What's the bathroom to do with it?

Mary

>

[Jerry]

OK, back yard gate then!...

[Jim Michaels]

Prisons and public schools have adopted a lack of privacy to help prevent banned activities.

Where are you finding these?

And what exactly are you describing?

Normal US public cubicles provide a passable degree of visual privacy. Admittedly your shoes are almost always visible to others Remove SPAMX from email address

[Huge]

In the Manhattan offices of the firm I work for.

Cubicles which start about 12" from the ground and finish about shoulder height (were one standing up).

They frequently have no doors. And cubicles which do not reach from floor to ceiling with a door that entriely fills the opening are not "passably private", IMO.

[Grimly Curmudgeon]

We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember Helen Deborah Vecht saying something like:

Probably ugly enough, though.

[Grimly Curmudgeon]

We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember Richard Conway saying something like:

"A penny saved is a penny earned, laddie."

[Grimly Curmudgeon]

We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember "Christian McArdle" saying something like:

Squirty foam does it nicely.

[Owain]

A penny saved is nearly twopence earned before tax.

Owain

[Mary Fisher]

Our income isn't enough to be taxable :-(

Not that it matters, it's still greater than our expenditure!

Mary

[Corinthian McVitie Keogh]

Used to play cards with a bloke who (he said) only did a shit once a week. I assume he went for a piss a bit more often though.

[Helen Deborah Vecht]

"Mary Fisher" typed

Mine is, but not at *that* rate...

As is mine. This apparently makes me 'financially naive'...

[Mary Fisher]

Or Micawber wise :-)

Mary

[Adam Funk]

That link [1] I originally posted was from an "ethical living" column. In summary, it's hard to tell which is ecologically better (trees vs. electricity) but it's known which is more hygienic and which is preferred by the users.

A typical facility contains several toilets, three sinks and one dryer. It takes much longer to dry your hands successfully using an electric dryer than to wash them, so the people who furnish the room know that the dryers are a joke and are basically saying "Screw you" to the employees and customers who have to use them.

[1]

[Jim Michaels]

I assume you are not 8 feet tall.

This is very unusual. This is done in prisons, some schools, and other high vandalism areas.

I spend more nights in a hotel than at home and the only place I have seen these was 10 years ago at a Turnpike rest stop (and they have since been changed to normal 7 foot tall cubicles)

Standard US cubicles start about 1 foot from the floor and are at least 7 feet tall, the doors are similar heights. Normally there are not stops (jamb extensions) to seal the edges and a small gap exists. Unless one were to place their eye right up to the gap all that can be seen is a stripe of the back wall. (Etiquette demands that you do not approach an occupied stall.

Remove SPAMX from email address

[Huge]

No, 6'3"

Then these offices are such an area. Do you think I'm lying or something?

[Chris J Dixon]

Yes (as Alstom), but not in the UK any more.

Chris

[Chris J Dixon]

About 1964, on a school trip to Paris, I was fascinated to find that the hotel toilets were flushed by pressing a button, which seemed to release pressure from an accumulator somewhere, but buses were stopped by pulling a chain, the reverse of my previous experience.

Chris

[Andrew Gabriel]

It was quite simple. As one of Weinstock's companies, you could borrow money from him if you could show him you would give him a better return on investment than he would get investing it elsewhere. He sat on a £1B pot which he used for this purpose. Only thing was, the return had to be within a year -- it was very difficult to borrow money for development over a longer period.

There were some companies in GEC which enjoyed a special position of supporting the rest of the group and didn't need to turn a profit themselves. The two best known were GEC Hirst Research, and Marconi Research. The one I worked for, GEC Computers, was also in such a position as the provider of computer systems for many other GEC companies. However, during the 1980's, all these companies were gradually turned into profit centres too, although I don't think any actually managed to make a return on investment.

Yep.

He spent years training his son to take over from him. His son died of cancer before he got to the point of taking over. I left GEC at that point, but my recollection is someone from Lucus was brough in to run the company, and the £1B cash mountain turned into a multi-£B hole in a remarkably short period of time. As you say, the company decided to get rid of all it's non-telecoms businesses (i.e. the opposite of the diversification Weinstock presided over) just in the lead up to the dot com crash. I never really understood this move as it also coincided with GEC having saturated the BT network (i.e. no more System X as all exchanges were now moderised), and having substantially failed to find any other large market for System X in the world, it seemed to me that the telecoms bit was heading for big trouble even if the dot com crash hadn't happened.

I wrote an article on this just recently from the point of view of future lack of security of UK energy supplies...