A clean, well-lit toilet.

Few aspects of one’s environment are as important as a good bathroom. In addition to the obvious purpose they serve, bathrooms represent the only true privacy available to most of us. Cell phones and e-mail now penetrate every other traditional bastion of solitude; only the restroom stall remains beyond communication’s reach. If work has become too stressful or boring or demanding, one can always claim asylum in the porcelain palace. If your wife insists upon watching American Idol with the volume turned up to jet-engine-like levels and your dog will not stop trying to eat your latest copy of Esquire you can always retreat to the cool, calm surroundings of the bathroom. If you are eating out with friends and the one from New York begins his 20 minute exposition on the superiority of everyone and everything in his home city for the 10,000th time, you can always excuse yourself and wait him out in the bathroom. Bathrooms provide a sort of last resort for coping; when annoyance has brought you to the brink of madness, the bathroom is always there to give escape, solace, and peace. Going to the restroom is kind of like calling a “time-out” in life.

This is why having a quality bathroom is so important. A bathroom should invite you to linger. If a bathroom is dirty, dark, or otherwise uninviting people will not be able to derive the maximum possible benefit from their bathroom breaks and will return to their lives cranky. In stressful surroundings it is often the bathroom that prevents widespread conflict. Skeptical? Then look at the bathrooms at hospitals. Hospitals are terribly stressful environments in which highly egotistical professionals battle one another for control over their patients’ treatments and ultimately their lives. Serious work, but they are given exceptionally nice bathrooms. The standard issue hospital bathroom is now of the private room design with “hands-free” soap dispensers, paper towel dispensers, light switches, and trashcans. They are also exceptionally well-lit. Really, the only fault one can find in your standard hospital bathroom is a certain antiseptic quality that is entirely understandable given a hospital’s mission.

Still skeptical? Go to the bathrooms in a corporate law firm. Corporate law is again a terrifically stressful job in which even a little mistake could cost millions of dollars. Undeniably overwhelming but they have truly spectacular bathrooms. Corporate law bathrooms lack the scrupulous attention to cleanliness that characterizes hospital bathrooms, but they make up for it with a host of little luxuries. Automatic shoe shining machines, little bottles of cologne, and those really nice paper towels that almost feel like cloth help attorneys continue to protect The Man’s money without feeling too stressed out.

I consider myself somewhat of an expert in bathrooms because I have been exposed to so many terrible examples of toilets and have seen the havoc they wreck upon the social fabric of the organizations involved. Take, for example, the bathrooms at Comiskey park. When they redesigned Comiskey park they converted to the dual-trough system of restroom design. For the unfamiliar, this design involves one giant urine trough and another circular cleaning trough that shoots water out of a pipe in the center of the structure. As you can imagine, this is a terribly uninviting bathroom design. Foreigners can’t even quite figure out how the hell to use the various apparatuses (I have personally seen a distinguished looking Asian man take a leak in the sink). Since the Comiskey redesign the White Sox attendance is down precipitously and the team hasn’t won jack shit. Coincidence? I think not.

An even clearer example of bathroom-related functional impairment can be provided by my former fraternity. My fraternity had what was certainly the single worst bathroom in North America. Every 20th or 30th time it was used the urinal in this bathroom would get stuck in super-flush mode and spew water all over the bathroom floor. In addition, one of the stalls was referred to as the “rainy stall” because another toilet on the floor above constantly leaked what we hoped was clean water onto the toilet below. Furthermore, ours was the only bathroom in the world that ran out of cold water. After about 3 seconds of using any of the fixtures the water temperature would go from tepid to boiling regardless of whether you had the hot or cold water running. This rendered the shower unusable for obvious reasons. These deficiencies were only the consistent problems. There were other, more episodic, issues. Like the roof falling down (this was probably somewhat related to rainy stall). I once had to rescue our chapter president and my roommate when a large piece of rotten drywall fell from the ceiling and trapped them in the toilet. Then there was the constantly flushing toilet. This doesn’t sound that bad until you realize we had one of those industrial tankless toilets that shot a highly pressurized stream of water in the bowl in order to flush. The sound was really annoyingly loud, and our water bill for the month in question rose by 1200%.

As you might surmise, our dilapidated bathroom began to affect our overall effectiveness as an organization. We became crankier and were unwilling to kiss a sufficient amount of national ass to stay on their good side. Eventually, we were reorganized (for a particularly funny reason that I will detail in a later entry). All this occurred because we didn’t care to linger in our bathroom for an appropriate amount of time.