Twice this month I found that I’ve found that I’m a better conversationalist when I’m waiting in line to use the bathroom in those bars, places, or homes that don’t have separate bathrooms by gender.

I guess it’s the combination of boredom, a captive audience, and the need to distract myself from my bladder causes me to strike up a conversation.

It gets me wondering if this is one reason women, who have to endure “the pee line” on an almost daily basis, go to the bathroom in groups.

But mostly it gets me thinking about an obscure piece of Caltech arcana.

In the North Houses, the bathrooms have urinals, stalls, showers and a sink. This makes them impossible to have a locked door/pee line combination. They were designed at a time when the campus was single-gendered (male). When they became multi-gendered, before that balance was anything remotely like a geek event, this represented a big logistical problem.

The solution, I felt, was quite clever. Basically all you needed was an old LP, a nail, and a white-out pen and created the dial-a-gender bathroom:

Just turn the wheel…like magic!

(I thought the bottom quadrant was quite clever.)

[The death of dial-a-gender after the jump]Continue reading →

Two of my friends over dinner discussing a third…

“I wonder if she’s ‘high maintenance’.”

Then he immediately adds, “She probably is. Women that pretty usually are.”

I quietly smiled to myself. Not because she was or wasn’t “high maintenance”—I hadn’t a clue either way—but because it reminded of a friend I had in graduate school…

[Experiments in maintenance]Continue reading →