Oh! I thought you were suggesting a way to implement unitary WCs. As a way to handle the current bathroom issues, the current solution for my floor is one staff member has IBS and checks in on the restroom approximating their gender about once every 2 hours. The other floors and restrooms have their own idiosyncratic methods.

You’re devoting at least 15% of the library sysadmin’s time to bathroom monitoring (the bathrooms are a long walk from the offices) assuming the bathrooms are empty each hour. You’re also requiring them to knock on each locked bathroom door and get a response (currently you can check for people passed out by glancing at feet under stall doors). There’s also the overhead of figuring out who is on bathroom duty when the sysadmin is out sick or working from home.

The budget crunch is at the state level, the library itself has very little ability to change it. We’ve already reduced subscriptions and services and staff to a skeleton crew.

We’re in a budget crunch. Last I checked there was an unwillingness to pay for more than 1 custodian. The restrooms get dire.

edit: we do have 2 non-staff ungendered single seater restrooms, but I can’t see anyone approving retrofitting the existing multi-stall restrooms in a way that costs money, arguably decreases safety, and increases pressure on custodial staff.

Students already get up to mischief in the shared bathrooms at my college library. Sometimes their “intent” runs contrary to the mission of the college–taking illegal drugs, setting off the fire alarm, making a giant mess with toilet paper everywhere.

A minor lack of privacy (private stalls, shared sinks) can help prevent bigger issues. If someone has a medical emergency (OD, for example) there’s a chance someone notices.

Depends on the state or municipality. My last few states charged an annual car tax. My current one charges it at the town level.

Fair.

I was really only confused about the “Her favorite job was working as a taxi driver for 15 years.” Everything else made sense, that just felt like a bad phrasing on the reporter’s part. Other jobs, I was replacing shingles on my family’s buildings at 15, folding boxes under the table for a local bakery before then.

No hard feelings? TBH, I should have disengaged sooner because I felt myself going down the “maybe if I overexplain my stance they’ll agree with me and everyone’ll be happy” rabbit hole, when I should have figured out that we were talking past each other. Like, it felt so… yeah, no, the events in the article are messed up. Clearly if I feel that so strongly everyone else can read my mind and knows that without me saying anything [spoiler alert: people can’t read my mind]. Then I fixated on the detail of the date and you maybe thought that was all anyone in the thread was taking away from the article, which didn’t help anything.

I don’t see how I misread the article. I believe the article is unclear and the bit about the taxi job is open to interpretation. I did not jump to conclusions about the interviewee’s work history. I stated how I interpreted what the article says about her work history. The article may or may not accurately reflect reality and may or may not accurately reflect the interviewee’s telling of her work history.

I never said you weren’t allowed to feel a certain way. I stated what you did and how that affected the thread’s trajectory. Do you think I said you weren’t allowed to feel a certain way? I don’t get why you’re bringing it up.

And pardon me for assuming that the stance of most of the people who responded to this post was the obvious stance.

Clarification: are you more upset because you think I’m a man? I have been on the internet since the 90s and, as we all know {joke} there were no girls on the internet in the 90s.

You jumped to insulting people’s reading skills when they questioned something that was unclear in the article (“Oh you don’t understand paragraphs, I see.”)

I responded because my numbers autism said “ah, I see. Velma doesn’t get how the math doesn’t math, let’s make that clear so the world is less confusing.”

If you’d just said “huh, yeah, the reporter could have worded that better” then this thread would have ended. Instead I think that you don’t care that the math doesn’t math and you’re viewing attempts to figure out what the reporter meant the convey as attempts to call the interviewee a liar. I hadn’t even considered that the interviewee might have been wrong about her life experience until you suggested it–it seems more likely that the reporter’s article was unclear, especially since the “15 years” bit wasn’t a direct quote.

I didn’t comment on anything else in the article because I didn’t think I had much to contribute on anything else. My stance is so obvious that what would I say on that that hasn’t already been said? Here: “yeah, that’s fucked up. I’m glad she’s no longer incarcerated. The USAian system has problems. This happened before the overturn of Roe v Wade‽ I can imagine how much worse a similar situation would be handled now”.

Yeah, but I can’t imagine using a 15 year old as my confidant. Then again, adults were telling me about their woes over the phone (I had a job calling people to tell them where to show for a phone book distribution gig).

Hi, this is such and such company. Are you still interested in delivering phone books? Please show up at X sketchy parking lot to pick up your allotment.

Oh, I can’t. I just had a miscarriage/license suspended for drunk driving/court date. Let me tell you more details because you’re Bad At Phone and Don’t Know How To End A Call and Free Therapy.

(edit: typo and formatting)

When did I ever say she was lying about her jobs? I said the timeline presented by the article didn’t make sense because it didn’t.

A writer in need of an editor is different than an interviewee telling lies.

I think maybe “taxi driver” was her favorite job of the last 15 years. I agree that it’s just badly worded in the article.

I’m just trying to figure out when she’d spent 15 years as a taxi driver, before the age of 26.

26-15=11

15+11=26

Did she start as a taxi driver at age 11, or did she not work as a taxi driver for 15 years? I’m just not understanding the timeline.