The Restroom Nightmare Before Christmas
The first of multiple tales from post occupancy evaluations
You’re a seven-year-old first grader, sitting in class, squirming in your seat as you struggle to listen to the story being read by your teacher, Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas – the original poem the animated movie is based on, not the picture book based on the movie. You’ve managed to avoid using the restroom most of the morning, but now your bladder may actually be stretched beyond its capacity. She canna’ take any more captain! She’s gonna blow!
As you switch your crossed legs yet again, Ms. Chávez reaches the end of a monologue from the main character Jack, There must be more to life than just yelling, Boo! But your teacher, channeling Jack, decides to pause before dramatically yelling BOO! At this point you’re only half paying attention to her, the other half intently focused on keeping your internal dam from bursting. And your teacher’s dramatic flourish almost releases the flood gates.
You meekly raise your hand and ask to go to the restroom. Your teacher seems a little annoyed (as do some of your classmates at the interruption), but she nods approval. You exit the room and make a beeline for the restroom. But as much as your bladder wants to be standing in front of a urinal, the rest of you would prefer to be anywhere else.
Shortly after the school year started, you began hearing the rumors, the stories, trickling down from the older kids. The restrooms are haunted. The stories vary but most revolve around a sad tale of a construction worker electrocuted in one of the restrooms during the building of the school, the worker’s spirit subsequently doomed to wonder from restroom to restroom. The spirit targets lone students, with a preference for the younger kids, waiting until they’re engaged in their business. At that point the specter turns the lights out and well, you didn’t want to know what happens after that.
So, it was common knowledge among the kids NOT to use restrooms alone. NEVER use them alone. But your bladder can’t wait anymore. I canna’ change the laws of physics, Captain!
“I’ll be quick,” you think to yourself. In and out, no problem. You barely get yourself situated at the urinal before the geyser erupts. Relief floods your body as the pressure decreases. But that relief is quickly replaced by a growing anxiety. “This is taking too long,” your panickily say to no one in particular. You look down but the stream is still pretty strong. “Come on, come on!”
At that moment there’s a quiet click as the lights go out. Panic takes control of your mind and body as you scream in terror. You have only one thought – flee the restroom as fast as possible. You do, stream still in full flow.
This story is from a post occupancy evaluation (POE) of a New Mexico elementary school I conducted in 2011. The details are embellished, but the basic narrative reflects a real problem with the restroom lighting controls in the school. The fluorescent lights were controlled with occupancy sensors set to operate in an auto-on/auto-off configuration (not uncommon for restroom lighting at the time).
Each restroom’s occupancy sensor, however, was having trouble seeing the younger, shorter students, particularly when there was only one or two students in the restroom. As a result, the lights would often turn off while younger students were still in the restroom under low occupancy conditions, particularly when they were sitting in a stall or standing still at a urinal. Not surprisingly, this became fertile soil for the older students to grow tales of ghosts, specters, and spirits, perfect for scaring the younger kids in the school.
And these toilets of terror tales were only enhanced by the delay in the lights turning on after entering the space due to the occupancy sensor sensitivity level settings (exacerbated for the younger, shorter students) combined with the use of rapid start fluorescent ballasts (which “turn on” the fluorescent lamps after a very short delay). All of this resulted in many of the younger students avoiding the restrooms (or rushing through the process). Think back to when you were that age. How eager would you have been to use these restrooms, particularly by yourself?
For the students, all of this resulted in:
concentration/performance issues in the classroom (from holding longer than they should as well as the dread of going to the restroom),
hygiene issues in the restrooms (from rushing through the process and getting urine and water everywhere), and
potential health problems (from consistently holding longer than they should).
Note that lower SES (socioeconomic status) students are disproportionately affected by facility problems impacting comfort and health, such as these, for a variety of reasons in part related to having on average less support (financial or otherwise) outside of the school. And this rural elementary school had a large percentage of low SES students, making it doubly important to uncover such issues, rectify them, and in general avoid them to begin with.
At the time, potential solutions that were suggested included:
Explore adjusting occupancy sensor sensitivity settings and/or time delay settings.
Consider relocating the sensor within each restroom and/or adding an additional occupancy sensor.
Change the occupancy sensor operation to auto-on/manual-off (assuming the delay in turning on could be adequately reduced).
Change the rapid start ballasts to instant start ballasts to reduce the delay in turning on (though that could also have reduced the lamp life some). As an alternative, the fixtures could have been replaced with LED fixtures, but at the time these were costlier with less market penetration.
But this was a rural school district with limited resources. District level maintenance staff serving as electricians, plumbers, HVAC (heating, ventilation, and air conditioning) system techs, etc., weren’t adequately trained to deal with some of the “high tech” systems integrated into this school’s renovation. At the school level, no one who was in the building on a day-to-day basis, including the school’s only custodian, was fully trained to operate the building management system (BMS) - the building systems’ brains. Only the principal and receptionist were trained enough to take care of some very simple tasks. The school also lacked operations and maintenance (O&M) manuals as well as some needed cleaning equipment and supplies.
And it's reasonable to ask, with all of their other primary responsibilities, whether or not the principal, secretary, and only custodian should be expected to have enough time and understanding of the BMS to make daily adjustments as needed (or troubleshoot other building system problems). That’s especially the case when building operational problems are creating even more work for them (e.g., additional urine and water to cleanup in the restrooms).
As such, the district typically must bring in professionals from urban settings, hours a way, to address these issues, costing additional money and time. It’s frustrating for these districts and schools. And it’s not uncommon for building owners in similar situations, with problems not easily rectified, to disable the “high tech” components (like occupancy sensors) to reduce the complaints of the occupants. Such actions might reduce energy savings, and in these restrooms where manual control isn’t available unless added, it would result in more energy usage than if manual only control had been used to begin with, because the lights end up being on all of the time.
All of this speaks to the need for thorough engagement of all relevant key stakeholders during planning and design to understand their needs, wants, and capabilities more deeply. It also speaks to the need for commissioning, particularly enhanced commissioning (only a limited version of fundamental commissioning was performed for just the HVAC system). And it speaks to the need for thorough post occupancy evaluations (enhanced if combined with some form of continuous monitoring) to validate performance and uncover and address the inevitable unintended consequences that occur.
The early engagements as well as post occupancy evaluations should also include an ethnographic component. Ethnography is one of the key work-horse methods of anthropology. Ethnographies are typically defined as systematic analyses of human interactions in a defined space and time, with a focus on performance, power (who has it and who doesn’t), and ritual, such as habits, processes, procedures, and events. And the concepts of ritual, performance and power apply to all human groups, whether we’re talking about Amazonian hunter/gatherers, North American school communities, or corporate officers in the board room.
Ethnographies of the built environment are therefore examinations of building and occupant performance, and how that performance is impacted by occupant and organizational habits, processes and procedures, met and unmet needs, and other human factors. Engaging the teachers, staff, and students in their school spaces, gathering their stories, observing the operation of the lighting controls in the restrooms myself as I tried to contort my body to the approximate size of a younger student (sans any other student or teacher in the restrooms), confirming my findings, hypotheses and preliminary conclusions with these school occupants, all allowed for a more nuanced understanding of the building/occupant organism. Gathering occupant stories also adds richness to the quantitative data gathered and analyzed, can help occupants feel their voices are being heard, and sometimes increases the urgency for taking action.
In the future I’ll share additional POE tales, from rural classrooms to urban corporate headquarters, to further emphasize their importance in general, and in particular to emphasize the importance of incorporating an ethnographic component. Doing so more often may help us leave the nightmares to the story pages.
Nice!