Disabled Toilets

When I worked in BT, things were terribly inefficient. We didn’t get laptops for two weeks, despite the fact our jobs were based on computers. Instead we had to bring our own from home. They didn’t run a criminal record check for eight weeks. They also didn’t check we were even doing degrees until this point. I have no idea what they would have done if I was actually a terrorist with no GCSEs trying to bring telecoms down from the inside, who actually enjoyed a good lynching of telephonic engineers in my lunch break. However, possibly the least efficient thing they did was send entire teams to ‘off sites’, which involved paying expenses of everyone who needed to be in a meeting. Not only was this expensive travel wise, it also meant that most of a day’s productivity was lost, when a meeting could have been held in an eight of a time in London.

I was sent in one such ‘off site’ in Newcastle, which had a lovely little building but had one major issue. The only disabled toilets in the building were on the top floor, which was only accessible by stairs. Completely incomprehensible. Presumably if you were disabled you had to either a) hold it until you got home or b) go in the Tyne.

But this got me thinking – is there therefore no one who is allowed to use this toilet at all? That would save cleaning. I have always assumed that disabled toilets are reserved for the disabled, in much the same way parking spaces are. But is this true? Anyone can sit on a disabled seat on a bus, so long as they willingly give it up if necessary. Are disabled toilets exclusively for the use of disabled people, or are they just equipped for them? And why the hell not make every toilet accessible for the disabled? This would be good and politically correct. I don’t know the answers to these questions, I would genuinely like your feedback.

I think I can imagine what BT might have liked to do, however; send anyone who wants to go to the toilet to a specific off site toilet in another city. That way everyone would spend all day travelling and not do any work at all.