As a man, you quickly learn not to walk up to a urinal too quickly. You want to glance at the floor beneath it for sticky patches or puddles, since apparently a depressingly large number of men are incapable or can't be bothered to pee into the convenient basin rather than dribble onto the floor.

Of course, it depends on the situation. At a ballpark or a concert, people are sloppy. When we went to meetings with the architects, their bathrooms were spotless. Either that is because of the context or because of the end users.

At work, the floor beneath the urinals is pretty clean. I didn't feel like I needed to be careful to avoid stepping in a sticky mess. Or, rather, it was pretty clean. Some time in the last few weeks, we reached a sort of dripping point where now there is commonly a small puddle stickily drying under the urinals.

I originally thought that it couldn't be because of just one new bad user -- a new hire who wasn't careful, or similar -- because it is there too often. Pretty much every time I go in, now, no matter what time. Note that the bathrooms are cleaned daily.

But actually, I think it could be one person, in a sense. It's not that he's peeing on the floor all the time, but that once there's already a sticky spot, other people are less careful. Plus it's less convenient to get close to the urinal, since you have to take a bit of a wide stance, as it were, to avoid stepping in the puddle. Which encourages dripping. So one sloppy person can have a widespread impact, where everyone else is sloppier as a result.

We have a blind man on our floor, who, based on previous cleanliness observations, must do a good job of getting the pee where it belongs. I wonder if he too is affected by the new environment, or if he still pees with accuracy because he doesn't have the visual input of the sticky spot that the rest of us has.

Anyway, how do we fix this? Posting a sign on the wall is too absurd and probably wouldn't work. If it really is an environment cues issue, then an extra cleaning in the morning might help. But I'm not doing it, for sure. There have been studies that show that the feeling of being watched can change cheating behavior (see this freakonomics blog entry about that): so maybe a poster of someone watching? Except that's super creepy above a urinal. Any other ideas?

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This brings up another topic. What do I tag posts like this with? I have a previous post (perhaps my most popular) that talks about urinals and behavior around them. How many urinal-related posts do I need to have before I need a tag for them? Would something more generic, like bathrooms, be better? I can imagine future bathroom-related posts that didn't touch on urinals, though I don't anticipate this being a common topic regardless.

The urinals at Binion's are incredibly poorly laid out. There are dividers that put urinals in sets of two, like so:

oo|oo|oo|oo

If you know anything about urinal psychology, you know that this is pretty much the worst possible layout. No man will go stand right next to another man in a tiny enclosure like that. This is actually worse than no dividers at all, because then if it's crowded, every urinal will get used -- but at least twice during barge, I saw men hesitate when each section was occupied, and then either hold off or head for a stall.

During some tournament break, I went into the restroom, and every section had someone in it. I paused, then decided that it was absurd to let silly social conventions get in the way of bladder relief, so I joined prock in his little cubby-for-two. We had the following interaction:

Me: Mind if I come stand uncomfortably close to you?
Prock actually looks uncomfortable, so I start to feel a little bad at not only impinging on his space but violating the no-talk-while-peeing-next-to-another-man rule, but then:
prock: Only if I can look at your penis.
Me: Uhhh.... I fold.

After finishing and washing, I walked out to see prock about to tell some hand story or other to hgfalling. That sounded boring, so I piped up in a tattletail voice, "Jerrod, Prock asked to see my penis!" Jerrod looked puzzled: "What?" Prock objected, "I didn't *ask* -- it was part of a negotiation."

hgfalling: Well, that makes it much better then. I mean if like the consideration is such that you are getting sufficient value, then you should probably let him. I mean, we play black chip holdem games, it seems like the consideration [interrupting himself when he sees michlan approaching] Honey! We're talking about Dave Orr's penis!

michlan, cowering: Wife repellant!

She turns to walk away.

Me: More like game theoretic considerations thereof.

hgfalling continues, but by this time prock and I are laughing too hard to have any recollection of what he was saying.

It occurs to me that this may be a "you had to be there" moment. Also amusing was Prock's repeated abortive step towards his video camera to try to record hgfalling's monologue.

I also had a fairly extensive conversation with pygmyhipo about optimal urinal divider placement given an infinite series of urinals in which he claimed (and it seemed plausible) that a divider for every three urinals maximised both urinal use -- if you can't afford a divider for every urinal -- but also urinators per divider.

You can't do better than 66% urinal penetration, but obviously you can do better than 2 urinators/divider that you get in the 3 case just by having fewer (lim->none) dividers. Dividers are worthwhile because they increase the number of urinals in simultaneous use without having to actually install the much more expensive urinals. So I think he overstated his case.