Herald Square Hilarity

Its finally nice here in NYC today, so I took the opportunity to have a quick bit of nosh in Herald Square Park and do some people watching. I wound up on a little chair on the outside of the park facing north near 6th with, of all things, a very computerized pay to use public toilet directly ahead of me. So I’m sitting and noshing on my overpriced Roman Lemon Chicken when a commotion of embarrassed shrieking and laughter kick in from near the toilet. The door is open and the woman inside is hiking up her skirt and a friend / brother / cousin (not boyfriend, no sane boyfriend would laugh at this) is laughing his ass off while being lightly shushed by a girlfriend / sister /cousin. He puts fifty cents in again, the door closes…and about 5 seconds later, for whatever reason, opens up again and the woman is jumping up again and now the guy is just howling. He steps inside to check out the scene and comes out a few seconds later but with a 4 foot strand of toilet paper stuck to his shoe, so now girlfriend is laughing, but the lady inside thinks she’s laughing at her…

And so it went for about three minutes while they tried to get the HAL the toilet to work and HAL turning on every light but “occupied” and opening the door just when you thought it would stay closed. Finally they gave up and I alerted the guy to the toilet paper streamer attached to his right shoe. Last I saw they were wandering toward Macy’s. Man, Jay Leno should get crew down here to film all the bladder challenged folk struggling with this contraption.

Anyhoo, I took a moment to look up the manufacturer of this toilet and by the press and the design of these things, you would really thing that the future is here now! These toilets play you music, self clean after every use, cleaned 3 times a day and are supposedly monitored via a central server. Now if the door would just stay closed. Oh yeah, there is also a 15 minute time-limit to how long the door will stay closed with someone inside, ostensibly to deter people from doing drugs in it, having sex in it, moving in et cetera. Come on now, not that I’m bragging here but 15 minutes is plenty of time to do some drugs AND have some wild sex if you just focus!