Stall Tales
by David Paulsen, Wausau Daily Herald January 20, 2005
In the unpredictable world of porcelain urinals and metal stalls, Jon Thompson is your first line of defense against a public restroom nightmare. Call him the washroom watchdog, or the private eye of public plumbing.
For three years, his Web site, restroomratings.com, has served as a playful and informative users' guide to public restrooms from Wausau to Japan, featuring restroom reviews, photos, user tips and ratings on a scale of 1 (better hold it till you get home) to 10 (utopian restroom experience).
Thompson, a 26-year-old native of Marathon who now lives in the Twin Cities, tries to write one review a week. With digital camera in hand, he braves the back rooms of restaurants, bars and gas stations and documents what he sees, so others won't have to enter unaware.
Web design is a profession and a hobby for Thompson. He runs his own design firm, Urban Sub New Media. Profiling restrooms is a part-time passion.
People often suggest ideal public restrooms to profile, but "I'm not that devoted," he says in a wry deadpan. "I don't go out of my way to get restrooms." Thompson composes about 90 percent of the reviews, and he acts as editor for all the independent reviews submitted to the site. They have to be written in the spirit of the site to be approved.
"I'm pretty picky," Thompson said.
The site has become popular in the Twin Cities, where the bulk of the profiled restrooms are located. Launch an Internet search for any given Minneapolis restaurant and chances are good that restroomratings.com will pop up as a secondary Web site. That kind of notoriety caught the eye of Minnesota Monthly magazine, which is profiling Thompson for its February edition.
But not everyone enjoys the public restroom reviews. The only Wausau review on the site is of the men's room at the Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum, which earned a rating of only 5 for a foul smell emanating from an unknown location.
The folks at the Woodson, ever conscious of the museum's image, weren't amused.
"I do have a sense of humor," museum director Kathy Kelsey Foley said, "but I think there are better uses of the Internet." A staff member discovered the negative review while searching the Internet for Web references to the museum - an occasional task intended to ensure Web sites are updated with the latest information about the museum.
The information on restroomratings.com was far from current, Foley said. The odor problem in the men's bathroom had been fixed long ago. When the museum contacted Thompson to let him know it had fixed the problem, he posted a favorable update on his Web site.
"We feel that our maintenance and attention to detail and obsessive behavior regarding the upkeep of our facility is second to none," Foley said.
Other reviews on the Web site have four public facilities in Marshfield, but Thompson isn't willing to draw any conclusions about central Wisconsin's restrooms.
"I haven't seen too many patterns emerge," he said.
The Web site actually was the brainchild of his wife, Ami. While they were on a road trip to Wisconsin three years ago, she commented that a restroom rating system would be helpful, so you knew what you were getting yourself into before entering.
Then, at Christmas, Thompson presented restroomratings.com to her as a gift. The original site featured only three reviews, including one of a Taco Bell restroom in a Minneapolis suburb. Thompson saw that restroom as a metaphor for urban sprawl.
"It was a big spacious bathroom with one toilet in it. It just seemed like overkill," he said.
From his research, he can recite a number of horror stories, including one in which a piece of "rather large fecal matter" was affixed to the toilet seat. "That was a bit of a gem," Thompson said.
A friend, meanwhile, found a bird's nest in an outhouse at a park campground. The nest was inhabited by chirping baby birds.
At the other end of the spectrum are the glorious restrooms, like the one at Loring Pasta Bar near the University of Minnesota. A good restroom, Thompson says, must be aesthetically pleasing but also functional. The restroom should be clean but not clinical, convenient but also unique.
He prefers touchless restrooms: Walk away and the toilet flushes. Wave your hand in front of a faucet for water. Restroom hardware salesmen, in fact, contact him sometimes to pick his brain on what equipment works.
Restroom technology is big business.
"There's a lot of solutions, I think, that haven't been found for the modern public restroom," Thompson said. "People are always looking for the toilet of the future." In the beginning, Thompson would have delivered that statement with his tongue firmly planted in his cheek. But over time he has developed a passion for the subject.
And he has enough pride now to walk into a public restroom with a camera without feeling ashamed. When he meets someone while carrying his camera, the other guy never says anything. Thompson uses that "unwritten rule" of restroom etiquette to his advantage.
With a hobby like Thompson's, it seems "completely fitting" that his father, who still lives in Marathon, is a plumber, yet Thompson never intended to follow in his father's footsteps professionally.
"I had no interest in plumbing at all until this started," he said.
