Using Stopwatches, Minders Will Make Sure No One Lingers too Long
The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey said Sunday it plans to add urinal monitors to all of the men’s rooms at Kennedy, La Guardia and Newark airports. The monitors, equipped with stop watches, will make sure no patrons at the airports’ 150 men’s rooms linger too long at the urinals.
“”If you use one of our men’s rooms, you will have only sixty seconds to stand at a urinal to get your business done,” said Elwood Atkinson, a Port Authority spokesman. “If your time runs out, the monitor will begin calling out loudly, ‘Time, sir, time.”
Atkinson said the monitors would not track how long patrons used toilet stalls in the airport men’s rooms, but he said the Port Authority would be “open to policing toilet use in addition to urinal use if the need arises.”
The new men’s room monitoring program comes in the wake of the resignation of Idaho Senator Larry Craig, a Republican who was arrested in June at the Minneapolis-St.Paul airport on lewd conduct charges after an encounter with an undercover policeman sitting in a toilet stall.
“Our lewdness consultants tell us that urinal lingering is a significant factor in men’s room behavior by men looking for sexual encounters with other men,” Atkinson said. “We want to nip this in the bud so that the millions of men who use Port Authority airport rest rooms can do so free from worry.”
Atkinson said the Port Authority was rushing to recruit more than 1,000 urinal monitors in the next week to staff all the airport men’s rooms on a round-the-clock basis.
“It’s a big hiring task, no question,” he said. “The manpower’s out there. We just have to find them.”
Atkinson said the Port Authority did not plan to fill any of the monitor slots with women, although he said it was possible the policy might be reversed “if our lawyers find that we risk violating equal employment opportunity legal considerations.”
Atkinson said the monitors would receive training about proper men’s room urinal etiquette and that they would be fully briefed about medical conditions that might cause some patrons to require more than 60 seconds to complete their urinal visit.
“To be on the safe side, I would advise any male travelers using one of our airports to bring along a letter from a physician if they have a medical problem that makes passing urine a time consuming project,” Atkinson said.