While in Boston last week, I got to attend some cultural sensitivity training. Oh, they called it something like Managing Virtual Teams In A Global World (or words to that effect), but it was really an attempt to educate us all about how different we are -- Americans versus Europeans, Dutch versus English, etc. -- and why can't we all just get along! (I'm hoping that I wasn't selected for this training because some of my colleagues had read this blog and decided that I was overly insensitive to other cultures, but that's always a possibility.) Anyway, it was all very interesting and enlightening but it failed to address a key cultural difference: Toilets.
I'm always surprised on my trips to the US by how different their toilets -- or rather, toilet stalls -- are. Be it in the office, the "restrooms" at Barnes & Noble in the mall, or in the executive lounge at Logan (shameless name drop, I know), the walls of each stall don't extend all the way to the floor. In fact, there's a good foot of space between the ground and the bottom of the wall, allowing you to identify the inhabitant by their shoes, trousers -- hell, if you're a US starlet, by your "va-jay-jay"(as I believe the kids are now calling it). This is highly unsettling. In the Netherlands, the toilet walls extend to the floor; you could kill someone in our office toilets and fellow occupants of the bathroom would be none the wiser. In the UK, there's a gap of just a couple of inches -- enough to allow the air to circulate in case you got trapped, but not much more. In Japan, you have the option of using white-noise generators to avoid embarrassment. But none of this in the US. Their stalls are far more like the ones you get in UK schools, which allow rampant bullying and the extraction of teenage girls who've just given birth unexpectedly in them during afternoon break.
I'm not the only one who noticed this, in case you think I'm weird. My Finnish colleague Kaisa -- owner of the delightful Tommy and kittens from June last year -- also raised this when telling me about her nasty bout of stomach flu. Most distressing. Thank goodness we're back with more civilized stalls.
2 comments:
You have a point about the stalls. However, I find Dutch toilets ugsome. Why must we . . . um . .. *look* at what we've done.
The shelf-like structure of Dutch toilets must be some unconscious (or conscious) manifestation of Calvanism. Let's see if we've been eating properly . . .
Your comment prompted me to go and check the toilets at work; we are fortunate in that they are "British" toilets, without the examination shelf. However, given that visiting a doctor costs money and the Dutch are famously thrifty, I'm sure that the self-examination shelf serves its purpose.
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