Toilet app – flushed with success

Fancy an investment? A toilet-related problem at work has given me a brilliant idea for an app...

The current lack of conveniences available for use in our offices is, well – inconvenient. Due to some underground pump-relating thingies failing (I’m very technically-minded, as you can see) we currently have to walk to different buildings several minutes away to spend pennies. Or other amounts of coinage.

We have options, which means I’ve visited a fair few lavatories I’ve never been to before. Some were good, some were bad. Some had very good things, but were let down in other ways. Sharing my in-depth report on my visits with strangely underwhelmed colleagues, I realised there was a money-making opportunity here – a loo rating app for you phone.

Why go through the misery of not knowing if a toilet is going to be nice, when you can open your phone and let the app show you ratings for your nearest available bogs? I had come up with a name, based on the popular “TripAdvisor”, but that’s unprintable, so we’ll go with “PooBer” instead.

Star ratings for loos are provided by users on cleanliness, privacy, temperature, layout, availability of hot water, and ambience, to provide an additional overall score.

If you think I’m round the u-bend, consider this: PooBer will allow you to make an informed choice about where you go to go. You can vote with your bottom, meaning establishments that fall below standard need to get to the seat of the problem and improve, or lose business.

Here are a few extracts from my trial version (admittedly, all by me):

“Privacy: 1 star. I’m not sure what the walls were made of, but it may actually have been paper. I’m pretty sure I could hear someone in the next cubicle’s heart beating. Take your headphones.”

“Layout: 2 stars. Why is the hand-dryer above the loo roll holder? It’s hard to get a grip on the tissue when it flaps about in the wind every time you go near it. There was space above the sink, people!”

“Temperature: 5 stars. An actual radiator in the cubicle. Even the seat was pleasantly warmed. Would visit again. Recommended. Happy buns.”

“Ambience: 2 stars. Is this what it’s like in prison? Breeze block construction, painted in faded mental institution green. Tired, battered and worn out. The toilet, not me. Avoid, unless you want to be depressed.”

“Cleanliness: 3 stars. I wouldn’t eat lunch there, but I don’t think I’m about to die from something I caught whilst visiting. Although I did just sneeze. Can you catch a cold from a grimy soap dispenser?”

“Hot water: 2 stars. Cold. Like rubbing you hands on a glacier. Then warmish, lulling you into a false sense of calm that everything will be OK, then instantly hot like you’ve just inadvertently put your hand in a microwave lasagne that’s you’ve overcooked to be on the safe side.”

Invest now, and wait for the cash to pour in. I’m not pulling your chain.

This post first appeared as my "Thank grumpy it's Friday" column, in The Mail, on the 8th of December 2017. The version used on their website was re-titled as "Flushed with success by toilet app brainwave", whilst the print edition became "Get ready for a chain reaction".

I'm not proud of this, but the original name for my app idea was 'ShitAdvisor'. I know. I feel bad about it too. I expected more of myself.

(CD A-Z: A 10 CD box set of Tangerine Dream stuff. Currently on "Seven Letters From Tibet". Moody.)

Making an exhibition of yourself

Now and again, it’s good to reaffirm that you’re a (relatively) normal human being. One excellent way of doing this is to go to a business exhibition. Despite what you might have surmised from reading my previous columns, I am employable, and even capable of acting like a regular person most of the time, even joining in the Monday morning conversation about the weather over the weekend, and why (insert name of footyballs manager here) should be fired immediately. The mug! True, there are times, often involving a caffeine deficiency, where it is like having the distilled essence of ten moody teenagers in the room, but I try and get that out of the way when people I genuinely like aren’t around to see it. As part of my ongoing experiment with what others call ‘working’, my ‘job’ involves me occasionally needing to go and see what some of my colleagues get up to outside the office, and what our competitors do to try and make sure that they do whatever my colleagues do better than ...

"It's all gone quiet..." said Roobarb

If, like me, you grew up (and I’m aware of the irony in that) in the ‘70s, February was a tough month, with the sad news that Richard Briers and Bob Godfrey had died. Briers had a distinguished acting career and is, quite rightly, fondly remembered most for his character in ‘The Good Life’. Amongst his many roles, both serious and comedic, he also lent his voice to a startling bit of animation that burst it’s wobbly way on to our wooden-box-surrounded screens in 1974. The 1970s seemed to be largely hued in varying shades of beige, with hints of mustard yellow and burnt orange, and colour TV was a relatively new experience still, so the animated adventures of a daft dog and caustic cat who were the shades of dayglo green and pink normally reserved for highlighter pens, must have been a bit of a shock to the eyes at the time. It caused mine to open very wide indeed. Roobarb was written by Grange Calveley, and brought vividly into life by Godfrey, whose strange, shaky-looking sty...

Suffering from natural obsolescence

You know you’re getting old when it dawns on you that you’re outliving technological breakthroughs. You know the sort of thing – something revolutionary, that heralds a seismic shift it the way the modern world operates. Clever, time-saving, breathtaking and life-changing (and featuring a circuit board). It’s the future, baby! Until it isn’t any more. I got to pondering this when we laughed heartily in the office about someone asking if our camcorder used “tape”. Tape? Get with the times, Daddy-o! If it ain’t digital then for-get-it! I then attempted to explain to an impossibly young colleague that video tape in a camcorder was indeed once a “thing”, requiring the carrying of something the size of a briefcase around on your shoulder, containing batteries normally reserved for a bus, and a start-up time from pressing ‘Record’ so lengthy, couples were already getting divorced by the time it was ready to record them saying “I do”. After explaining what tape was, I realised I’d ...

grumpyf1

Search This Blog