Poll: Which sex's restroom is grosser? *GROSS!*

[Noo_Noo]

I have to say, that even as a woman myself I find the women's toilet worse to clean. There's always piss to mop off of the floor in the gents but in the ladies it takes on a whole new level. No, I DO NOT want to pick that up dammit!

[Noelegy]

Gah, women's, for sure (and I'm female, just for data points). And I think a large part of the ick factor for me is that everyone wasn't raised like I was. I'm not a neat freak, but my mom taught me to wrap feminine products in tissue before throwing them away. Everyone's mom didn't teach them this.

Where I work now, we have wall-mounted tissue seat protector dispensers in each stall. Despite this, I'm regularly confronted by piddle on the seat, and the other day there was a memorable loogie that had been hocked on the seat.

And for the love of all that's sacred, what are some of these women EATING?!?! Stinkeee...

[SuperDan]

I agree with the majority that thinks the ladies room is worse. At my store, the mens room has more graffiti (the ladies room does have some, but not much), but as for actual cleanliness, there is a huge difference. (We have one set of restrooms that is located on the sales floor and serves customers and employees/vendors.)

In the mens room, usually the only noticeable problem is the floor. Especially in the morning. Employees and vendors frequently come through with dirty and sometimes wet feet. That's not a big deal. Sometimes the sinks may become dirty because of said employees and vendors who spend their time throwing around dirty boxes and pallets washing their hands. This I can deal with. The one bad thing is the urinal. We originally had a urinal that protruded from the wall similar to a toilet. We had problems with assholes throwing garbage/gum/cigarette butts into it and clogging the drain. The company switched to one of the against-the-wall upright urinals. However, in the company's infinite wisdom and cheapness, they decided it wasn't worth the expense to move the plumbing higher to accommodate for the different positioning needed for the different urinal style. Therefore, the top of the urinal is an inch or two below waist-level on me (I'm 6'2") and it's the type where you're supposed to aim for the middle. Because of this, there is occasionally a few drops of urine on top of the urinal from people who don't aim down far enough. A squirt or two of disinfectant and some paper towel solves this issue just fine. The remainder of the problems in the mens room pertain to graffiti, which I often just ignore anyway (the boss tried white-out once, that was amusing).

The ladies room is always horrible. The floor and sinks may not be as bad (sometimes are, usually not). The stalls, however, get ridiculous. First of all, my company is too cheap to buy liners for the sanitary disposal bins in the stalls, so in order to empty these (I'm one of maybe two or three people who even do this, the rest of the guys just ignore them no matter how overflowing or smelly they get) I generally end up putting on latex gloves and grabbing some paper towels and trying to scoop everything out with paper towels, dumping the contents in the main garbage can, then spraing disinfectant inside the sanitary bins and around the lids. Next are the toilets. There is generally urine or fecal matter on top of at least one of the toilet seats if not all three, thanks to people thinking they need to "hover" despite the fact that I disinfect that entire room within an inch of its life every two hours. If I'm lucky it'll only be on the seats. Quite frequently it's also on the area between the seat and the flush plumbing, underneath the seat, and around the rim of the bowl. Every once in a while it gets on the floor and on the outside of the bottom of the bowl. About once per week it gets all over the walls too. On particularly festive occasions, we find it on the ceiling. (This only happened once actually, but it's fun to think about ladies projectile pooping high enough to hit the ceiling, or maybe I just need a psychologist.) Finally, one of the easier parts actually, is the baby changing table. It isn't used as its intended use all that often (moreso than the one in the mens room, but not like an everyday thing) so it usually gets popped down anyway and used to hold coats, purses, smocks, whatever. We have an industry in the area that puts out loads of this annoing red crap as a biproduct of whatever they do, and it gets on everything. Aparently someone who works there also shops at my store daily and sets her purse on the changing table. Therefore this red crap is on the changing table and needs to be scrubbed off with the aid of the bleach-based restroom cleaner we use.

The really annoying part is trying to get it clean though. I am a guy. If our one lady cleaner isn't around, it is the utility clerk's job (or floor care guy's job if we happen to have one that day) to clean both restrooms. The ladies room is larger, so if I'm going to do a proper and thorough job of cleaning it, including sanitizing the toilets and sinks and polishing the stainless steel stall walls, it takes me a good 20 minutes with no interruptions. It seems though that every lady in the store notices me going toward the restrooms with the cleaning cart and picks that time to use the restroom. USE IT WHEN I'M DONE, TRUST ME, YOU DON'T WANT TO USE IT UNTIL THEN! Some are willing to wait a short time, some scream about how they take water pills and have to go bad or about how they work across the store and can't leave to go to the bathroom twice, and some fight their way around the cleaning cart which I've used to block the door and then look all surprised when they see me in there cleaning.

[rant]Why can't I just be like the other guys who just don't give a shit (pun completely intended) and do nothing in the restrooms but check the paper and mop the floor? One has flat out said he isn't paid nearly enough to clean up feces or used feminine hygiene products... and he's at the top of our pay scale! But not me, I have to take some pride in my work and insist that the bathroom is clean if I sign that I cleaned it... [/rant]

So yeah, ladies room it is.

[Irving Patrick Freleigh]

On particularly festive occasions, we find it on the ceiling. (This only happened once actually, but it's fun to think about ladies projectile pooping high enough to hit the ceiling, or maybe I just need a psychologist.)

Poop...on the ceiling?! How is that even possible unless you poop lying on your stomach?

Anyhoo, I worked maintenance at my store for a summer (against my better judgement). The women's room was always worst to clean. Almost always fecal matter on the toilet seats and sometimes on the walls. And as for the sanitary disposal bins--well we're not going to go there. Used tampons can get really ripe really quickly

[powerboy]

At my store, they are too cheap to buy those liners for when you have to go poop. Also, we have no paper towels, just a regular towel that, the Owner takes home every night. He always worries about, if the health inspector came in, and saw a couple of papers on the floor, that we would be closed. Well dipshit, how about if they saw a regular towel instead of paper towels

[FTGTF]

I would definitely say the women's room. Although with guy's I think can make the men's room weird. Like I went into a store once and this guy was in one of the stall's taking a power crap. As soon as you opened the door you could hear him pushing away.

So I would say women's room the grossest, men's the most uncomfortable

[Ringtail Z28]

Womens restroom, no doubt. That caused more cart attendants (my store was too cheap to hire janitors) to quit more than anything else. Men's restrrom took an average of about ten minutes to clean, women's took about forty-five minutes.

[toomanycalls1]

Definitely women's

I had to clean the bathrooms when I worked at Jewel back in the horriiblest time in my life.

Most of the time they weren't all that bad.

I could make the cleaning last as long as I wanted to. The bathrooms were away from everything so often I took my time.

At my current office jobs the ladies room is beyond horrible. I talk to the cleaning people the men's room is not bad at all. Ours is so bad we often go to the one on the first floor.

My brother once saw written on a stall wall "For a good time call 800 THE CUBS and ask for box seats"

[Scottya21]

I would have to vote womens...but I am wondering, while asking dumb chat room talk questions like ASL is not allowed...which gender is voting for which room?

I wondered that too.. but we're not exactly doing a statistics study here ;-)

[wagegoth]

So it makes sense to avoid washing after peeing, kinda sorta.

The problem is that people unconsciously touch their eyes, nose and mouth zillions of times a day, and washing your hands every so often is a good idea, especially during cold & flu season. Since you're already in a bathroom with a sink, soap, and towels, might as well clean up. Just turn off the water with a disposable towel. Motion-activated sinks are ideal.

Here's my scenario for the men might consider who don't wash their hands after taking a leak:

You're at a friend's house on game day. You're sharing bowls of chips, munchies, plates of sandwiches, game controllers, etc. Now, think about the fact that your friend who just went to the bathroom probably has his hands covered with his penile cells (if not worse) and just stuck his hand into the shared food, or grabbed your game controller or TV remote. Do you really want to share his DNA, especially from that part of his body? I mean, haven't you ever gotten a little freaked to find someone else's short hairs on your toilet or in your shower?

[wagegoth]

Yes, your hair has a lot of germs. Most people don't wash their hair every day, and hair is a gigantic germ magnet.

[Crosshair]

I figure my immune system can use the workout.

[Ree]

we're not exactly doing a statistics study here

No, but RentalRacer had a valid point that the results could be a little skewed if one sex voted that the other sex had the worst bathroom.
Also, it would be interesting to know if the opposite was also true.

[Rapscallion]

I'm curious as to how many people have cleaned the restrooms of the other gender. I'd have thought that mostly it would have been a same-sex event, if I'm making sense.

Rapscallion

[Scottya21]

I'm curious as to how many people have cleaned the restrooms of the other gender.

From what we've been hearing on here, it seems that it's mostly one person does both restrooms. I guess it depends on the organization and such. In our case it wouldn't really make sense because the male's wc would only be done while I was in ( being the only male employee).