Monday, May 01, 2006

You can stop holding your breath now

As I promised last Monday, here is the solution to the Great Toilet Puzzle.

Well, kind of. I still think you should work out some of it yourself, otherwise how will you hold onto your self-respect?

But it turns out my theory was correct, and it did all hinge (hah!) on the fact that the photo I posted last week was taken from the wrong side of the door. And, of course, that when I said I'd been into every toilet in the building and they were all the same, I meant every women's toilet in the building.

So today I lurked around the building until most people had gone home, and then nicked into the men's loos and took a photo to confirm my suspicions. I have absolutely no idea how I would have explained myself to anyone who might have walked in on me, but fortunately everyone working there is a civil servant who goes home at 4 pm. And I felt excitingly Veronica-Mars-like scuttling around surreptiously with a camera.

So here are the fruit of my labours. Right side around this time.

Women's loos:



Men's loos:



Geddit? Geddit?

PS: I still think the architect was insane. But in a good way. Right?

7 Comments:

Anonymous said...

Okay, I give up - what's the secret??

Anonymous said...

I thought it was so you could see whether someone was in the loo without actually, you know, seeing too much. But now I'm completely baffled.

StyleyGeek said...

Okay. It is braille. It's just that when I said it was braille for "I9", I was looking at it from the wrong side. If you look at it from this side the pattern on the women's loos spells "Eve" and the pattern on the men's loos spells "Adam".

Presumably so that blind people with giant hands at floor-level can check out whether they are in the right loo or not.

Unknown said...

it is actually for midget blind people. This is a huge problem in the US as so much braille is up high (like on the elevators -- all up high!), and the midget blind people just are at such a disadvantage.

Which of your weatherpixies most resembles you?

StyleyGeek said...

Good point, shrinky. Case closed :)

I'm trying to work out the logical thread that took you from toilets to the question of what I look like. Or was it from blind midgets to the question of what I look like?

Anyway, I usually most resemble Weatherpixie 8, but with glasses. Since my most recent haircut, though, the style is more like the pixie named "Dollz: Redhead", except that it's still blond.

Which one do you look like? (We could start this as a new meme.)

Unknown said...

Oh it was because when I first read your blog, i thought you were a guy because every time I read it, a guy weatherpixie was there. Then I noticed that it changed. Then when I posted about the plight of the blind midgets, I saw a pixie I'd never seen before chez toi, so I decided to ask.

I think # 8 looks most like me too - but we have wildly different wardrobes, and my hair is longer. I would have pegged you as #6.

StyleyGeek said...

I've got the weather pixies set to "random", so it should be a different one every time you load the page.

It's funny you thought I was a guy. I spent ages thinking New Kid on the Hallway was a guy, for some reason. Maybe the name New Kid, with its boyband associations was the reason. Even after I knew she was female, I kept thinking of her as male for ages when I didn't consciously stop myself.

Geekman posts on a lot of forums regularly and deliberately disguises his gender to make it impossible to tell. He flat-out won't tell people, either, if they ask directly. He's had a lot of people from both sexes hit on him because of this.