iStockphoto / DenBoma
The Yungang Buddhist Grottoes in China have received over 3 million visitors since 2023 and with 50,000 Buddhist statues carved across 252 caves, with statues that dating back over 1,500 years old, it is an incredibly popular global tourist destination.
With all of that foot traffic, the toilets at the UNESCO-listed World Heritage site in China get a lot of use. Recently, in order to ensure that guests aren’t squatting in the toilets for inordinate amounts of time, they’ve installed public timers which display how long someone has been in the stall for.
These public toilet timers are activated when someone closes the door and goes about their business. From there, anyone on the outside can monitor how long that person has been squatting on the porcelain throne.
A video of the public toilet timers in action has gone viral across Weibo and it later hit American/Global social media:
Hurry up, there’s a toilet timer in China
Digital timers show how long you are sitting on the toilet at the Unesco world heritage Yungang Grottoes in Datong city of Shanxi Province in China.#travel #nature #travelgram #wanderlust #FREENBECKYAT9ENT #adventure #travelblogger pic.twitter.com/G8FD9rAMUz
— SHORT TRIPS (@short_tripps) June 12, 2024
On Weibo (according to CNN), someone asked Why don’t they just spend the money on building more washrooms?” Answer: because that would be stupid. These timers are awesome.
Being able to monitor efficient use of time in the bathroom and shaming those who don’t is absolutely brilliant. I’m 100% here for this ingenious idea except with one caveat: I want to go for the high score.
Instead of caring at all what people on the outside are doing, I want to go for the record. Give me a few hours in there to see if I can break the timer. In fact, I want to find out if there are increasing levels of urgency. At 30 minutes I want a red alarm to go off to alert everyone that there’s someone in the stall who really means business. At 2 hours, I want people banging on the door to see if I’m still alive while throngs of cheering people on the outside root for me as I go for the record. That’s how this should be used.
Interestingly, this isn’t the first time public toilet timers have made headlines in China. A few years back, a company put these timers on the bathrooms to monitor employees and people lost their minds over it. Again, they’re thinking about this all wrong. They need to be going for the high scores and not worrying about being tracked by Big Brother.