The Future of Office Furniture
06/05/2010 13 Comments
Over the past few weeks I have been closely monitoring my bathroom habits at work. On average I do 4.6 wees and half a poo at work every day.
A round trip for a wee takes 107 seconds. A round trip for a poo takes 343 seconds*. This means every day I lose 11m 4s of valuable work time going to the bathroom. I work about 225 days a year but 5 of them, a full work week, is spend going to the bathroom.
The number of people employed in the UK is 28.82m so we are losing around 664,000 years of work time every year by people going to the toilet. Imagine if somehow we could get this time back. Imagine the boost to the economy if overnight we added 664,000 person-years of work to the economy annually.
I have a solution. Office furniture.
Specifically, I have designed a new chair. For the most part it is the same as a standard office chair with variable height, arms and lumbar adjustment. However it has one key, built-in feature not found in the current generation of office chairs – a toilet.
Just take a moment to behold the beauty of this suggestion. Office chairs with built-in toilets.
There are two key benefits:
- 664,000 person-years of work extra in the economy every year
- Cheaper office space (since you don’t need to pay for floor-space for bathrooms)
There is one down-side however:
- Someone in the office might do a smelly poo
I have thought about this problem at length and have solved it by making a small adjustment to the chair design. I would have one of these built into the arm on every chair so any worker could quickly avoid embarrassment with a simple press of the button.
The chairs would not be cheap but given the boost in productivity they would easily pay for themselves in a few months.
Although the office is the most obvious place for such a device there are many more applications. A couple of years ago on a flight to New York, I sank a few mini-bottles of wine and just as my bladder told me it was time to go to the toilet, we hit turbulence and the seat belt light came on. I spent the next hour in agony – unnecessarily in my opinion. The simple installation of toilets into aeroplane seats would have completely removed this problem. It would also mean that airlines could remove bathrooms from the plane and therefore fit in more seats. Again – they pay for themselves.
Our fragile economy needs a boost now more than ever. No party has shown us a policy which comes close to instantly add 664,000 person-years of work to the economy annually. Our nation’s financial ills will not be solved overnight by national insurance hikes or inheritance tax cuts. The solution is far more simple. The solution is office furniture.
RedEaredRabbit
* Note I did not count today’s disaster in the time keeping as it would have skewed the figures
P.S. Since writing this article I have trade marked The Stool Stool as the brand name for this product.
About RedEaredRabbit
RedEaredRabbit 
This is probably the craziest story I have ever come across as far as an office chair design. But, hey, it definitely would increase productivity but at the same time isn’t it always nice to get up and take a break every once in awhile and using the bathroom is the perfect excuse.
The exercise point is a good one. I will therefore offer a deluxe model with an in-built exercise bike.
This would comprise of a set of resistance adjustable pedals such that the occupier could pedal away at their leisure.
They could, of course, simulateously do a poo should the mood take them.
Nice blog of office furniture.
I like it.
Office furniture is one of the main components of the interior decor of your office. In order to have a pleasing work atmosphere in your office, you want to select the furniture that suits the theme of your office interior.
Thanks.
Thanks for thoroughly reading my blog post and replying with something so relevant and insightful! Cheers.
I love it. Your next step is this
http://www.bbc.co.uk/dragonsden/apply/
I am going to bloody do that.
Hmmmmmm, I remember this. There’s one more problem you need to consider….noise factor. Besides the ordinary poop sound problem, there’s the obvious embarrassing noisy (morning after a night on the town) poo. Perhaps some form of muffle device should be developed or a selection of music designed to mask the sound of any type of poo, this could include a range of tunes to suit any deposit.
Love the name,truly inspired!
This could be your ticket to a life of fine wine and posh nosh……..(oh, I guess I mean MORE fine wine and posh nosh then!)
If you market the scalextric idea I will have to sue your ass for my cut, boy!
Good point about the sound. On the Stool Stool Deluxe, I will therefore add a feature such that when an employee is about to indulge in a morning after bout of crop-spraying they can at the push of a button play Johnny Cash’s “Burning Ring of Fire” at high volume.
This combined with the spray from the air freshener will leave fellow office workers none the wiser as to what just took place.
None the wiser……you sure?!!!!
Love it, I say put it into production pronto.
I am afraid to say I am not in favour of this ground breaking invention. Call me old fashioned, but I prefer my ten minute morning break with an old edition of the Metro to be in private.
You may prefer it, but the economy needs you to work, not read the Metro.
A very good idea. I think if you can properly manage the public wiping issue, perhaps a bidet/dyson air blade combo, then it can roll out. Possible extensions include the pub stool stool as I for one am sick of traipsing to the so called toilets in most pubs. I have considered colostomy bags but perhaps this is too radical.
A Dyson Airblade is going to push the cost up a bit but we could always incorporate a cheap hairdryer into one of the arms so that workers could dry their bum manually.
Definitely a brilliant application in the pub. That is where people go to the bathroom most frequently so the pubs will sell more drinks by people not leaving their chairs. Coupled with the extra floorspace through removal of bathrooms they will again pay for themselves quickly.