A video recently shared on various Chinese news and social media sites shows a set of timers installed above a row of toilet cubicles in a female washroom, with each stall getting its own digital counter.
When a stall is unoccupied, the pixelated LED screen displays the word “empty” in green. If in use, it shows the number of minutes and seconds the door has been locked. ‘We won’t kick people out midway’
The original video was reportedly taken by a visitor who sent it to the Xiaoxiang Morning Herald, a state-run local newspaper.
'We won’t kick people out midway’
The original video was reportedly taken by a visitor who sent it to the Xiaoxiang Morning Herald, a state-run local newspaper.
“I found it quite advanced technologically so you don’t have to queue outside or knock on a bathroom door,” the paper quoted the visitor as saying.
“But I also found it a little bit embarrassing. It felt like I was being monitored.”
I mean, what problem are they trying to solve? And is long-sitting people really the main cause of that problem?
If a tourist destination is frequently winding up with people waiting for an open stall, and if the majority of people are in the stalls for what is considered a normal amount of time in their home country, then the actual problem is that the place simply doesn’t have enough stalls and needs to add more
My guess is it’s for the women’s restroom because when bathrooms are busy, most women just wait for a stall door to open and don’t always bend over to look under the doors to see if they’re even occupied. It’s also probably hard to see from a distance if the stall is occupied or not and nobody wants to be the one to shamefully walk back to the line because they had to get closer to check.
Nah occupied/unoccupied status lights have already been in existence for a while. The new thing happening here is that they’ve added a visible stopwatch counter