Take that, you lousy fly! Every Friday I walk up to where my wife works in downtown Atlanta to the food court attached to various hotels and businesses, including the Marriott Marquis, to have lunch with her.
The food there is average fare, and the diet Coke causes me to visit the men's room before walking back. It has two urinals where management recently added one fly to each urinal, not a real fly, but one that is pasted onto the porcelain and appears to be plastic. At first I thought they were real; but to have one in each receptical fly and stick to exactly the same spot? Unusual.
After several visits on different Fridays I came to realize that these flies were not real. I felt like asking any strangers who might be standing next to me what they thought these flies were for, but it's something you don't do. It would be a somewhat stupid question. Except to a kid.
And that's what finallly happened. Three boys about eight years old were in the rest room after one of my lunch excursions, with one boy next to me at the urinals. I said, noting that no adults were in there, "Hey there's a fly in your urinal." The kid looked at me and, without batting an eye, said, "I know." That still didn't answer my damn question. Why were there flies in the urinals?
Today, I'm over at the county courthouse and lo and behold, I notice in the men's room two pasted BEES in their urinals. WTF?
I decided to let Google answer the matter. The first website I looked at was about Urban Legends. Ah ha! I click on this website to, I don't know, find a way to criticize flies in urinals and the stupid people who think it's so funny to place them there. Come to find out, it's not an Urban Legend, but TRUE! See?
Analysis: The story is a bit dated — it has been floating around the Internet in various forms since 1997, with the earliest variant attributed to an article in the Wall Street Journal — but it's true. Most recently the fly-in-urinal concept was touted by engineering professor Kim Vicente in his book, The Human Factor (Routledge, 2004), as a prime example of "human-friendly design."
I don't know about human friendly design, but according to a Robert Krulwich
story he did for NPR, this idea was perfected by a Dutch maintenance man:
[Aad] Keiboom [airport manager] in Amsterdam says the original fly idea was proposed almost 20 years ago by Dutch maintenance man Jos Van Bedoff, who had served in the Dutch army in the 1960s. As a soldier he noticed that someone had put small, discrete red dots in the barracks urinals, which dramatically cut back on "misdirected flow."
So I guess you know where this is going. Guys who see flies in their urinal will invariably take aim and try to destroy the little bugger. And this prevents spillage, or misdirected flow, so much so that in the Amsterdam example, spillage was reduced by 80 percent. This saves in clean-up costs.
The Krulwich story speculates on how this was calculated:
[co-author of the blog Nudge] [Richard] Thaler has tried to imagine how the airport made its calculations. "I'm guessing somebody went to the urinals without flies and repeatedly soaked up the ordinary spillage with a paper towel," which he then figures was carefully weighed on a scale. Then the same experiment was done at fly-emblazoned urinals, and presumably the scales reported a dramatically measurable difference in soakage.
Women raising boys also find the idea, er, appealing.
However it was done, it's not exactly news that urinal targets reduce spillage. Julie Power, co-founder of a blog called Moms To Work, says she recently took a red Sharpie pen and wrote "AIM" in big letters on her home toilet bowl, and her twin boys immediately focused on the target.
And...
Another mother reported on Thaler's blog Nudge that she tears off individual patches of toilet paper and tells her boys to "cut this in half." It apparently works. Thaler recommends Cheerios. Even though they move, or maybe because they move, Cheerios tend to focus young male minds.
But where would one get a urinal fly that's been tried and tested? Well, from urinal fly dot com, that's
where.
This handy website sells the flies and provides detailed instructions (PDF) on how to install them.
Urinalfly also answers burning questions in its FAQ, such as "how long will my fly last?" and "why are the flies you send getting smaller?" (Answer: "because we listen to you, the customer").
So what's this have to do with the political situation? Almost nothing, except I note an interesting thing about the history of urinal bulls-eyes. From the NPR examination, Krulwich seems to have discovered the reason men and boys aim at flies:
The ability to use one's natural gifts and achieve victory over the foe while standing is the key, he [Aad Keiboom] explained. Guys, he felt, can always beat flies. That's why flies are so satisfying.
Is that the answer?
Berenbaum, the entomologist, says she's not convinced. More than a hundred years ago in Britain, bathroom bowls also sported insect images, she says. Back then, however, the favored target was not a fly, but a bee. And bees have stingers. It seems that men in the 1890s were willing to take more imaginative risks when peeing.
Whata ya think? Doesn't this sound like the difference between a conservative (even tea party) Republican and a risk-taking progressive-to-liberal Democrat? Which persuasion would be more likely to take down the weaker fly and which the stronger bee? Republicans would rather hold on to a sure thing and Democrats are more willing to branch out to newer ground. Would you rather cut the bee in half or strive safely to shower the fly?