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.”

  • Glowstick@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    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

      • intensely_human@lemm.ee
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        5 months ago

        Well they either died in which case checking doesn’t help, or they didn’t in which case checking doesn’t help either.

          • intensely_human@lemm.ee
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            5 months ago

            Whether you make a policy of knocking on bathroom doors, based on that reasoning, should be based on whether you’ve actually experienced a stall shortage caused by undetected death in the stall.

      • optissima@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        To not even consider being stuck on a toilet for that long, I’m jealous of your non-IBS digestive tract.

      • Glowstick@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        That doesn’t sound likely to be the reason. That’s an extremely rare event that doesn’t need a regularized solution. And visible timers is pretty much the least useful way to address that problem, instead of using standard emergency pull cords or even just an alert sound that rings after X minutes.

    • Jessica@discuss.tchncs.de
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      5 months ago

      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.

      • Glowstick@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        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