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Comment by DanielStraight | Hacker News Reader

Sounds like the real problem is that you don't have enough toilets.

We can hope the logs help to make the problem very concrete and easy to argument.

If you can push numbers about the maximum time someone has to wait before having access to a bathroom, the qualification of the problem could shift from "inconvenient" to a potential health problem.

My thoughts exactly. Kudos for geeking out on the problem, but that shouldn't be necessary.

On the other hand, building new bathrooms or expanding existing ones can be a long and expensive process, so improving the efficiency of existing resources can be a smart way to go.

Especially in older buildings like the one MxM are based in...

http://s0.geograph.org.uk/geophotos/03/75/67/3756777_737cd93...

One of the easiest ways to do this is to declare the bathrooms unisex, especially if you have a serious gender imbalance at work. I worked at a startup office that had a (typical) 80% male to female ratio, but the building was designed with two male and two female toilets.

These were the types of bathrooms that had a single toilet, a single seat, and a door for the whole thing, much like a bathroom in your home. Having such a bathroom be assigned to one gender only doesn't really make much sense, but it was especially apparent when there was frequently a line for the men's bathrooms while both womens were empty.

The video/gif on the article shows both men and women entering and exiting. There is only one LED. There is only one website. The diagram only shows three stalls. I venture to guess that this bathroom is already unisex.

All three cubicles are indeed unisex. (I used to work there.)

Yep. The company I work for built something exactly like this [1] when we were sharing two single stall bathrooms with a floor that, during the day, was occupied by somewhere around 40 people.

And then we moved to an office with multi-stall bathrooms and it wasn't necessary anymore.

[1] http://pee.mover.io -- still up because we gifted it to those left behind (though I don't know if it's still functional).

Yeah, this has only become a problem in the last few months where we've been growing the company. We don't really have the space to build new toilets, and soon we'll outgrow our beautiful office, partially for this reason. For now I think we're happy to wait occasionally for the loo. As another poster observed, this project was a fun way to improve the waiting experience and make the most of the facilities that we have.

Not an easily solved problem, though, to just up and install new toilets. The only thing you can do at this point is optimize for wait times.

Well, there's always this solution: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/External_urine_collection_devic...

One of the developers at work put an Pi-sized device on one of the toilet stalls, with a page on heroku to show the status of the stall. It worked well, and yes, we do have too few toilets at work.. :(

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