Janitorial Discovery in Florida Restroom

Tony and I were in Florida for a couple days last week.

Nope – don't even ask. No fishing, no power boating, no colorful drinks with funny names and little umbrellas in 'em.

Ok, we may have had a few drinks… but they didn't have any little umbrellas.

Anyway, the point is we were down there on business and when we went to the airport to head home we made a rare and amazing discovery in the restroom.

Drum roll please…here it is…common sense; that elusive creature – good old common sense.
What do I mean?

Well, you see management had roped off at least half of the restroom – restricting use by the public, to of course – only one half.

However, even with access to only half of the facility, there were still plenty of stalls, urinals and sinks available for the steady, but manageable, number of visitors using the restroom.

I don't have to tell you the obvious value of this common sense idea, but I will.

There was no real downside to the public, other than not being able to roam freely in a facility twice as large as was needed.

But to the maintenance staff – the time savings of having to clean only 50% of the space was – I'm sure – significant.

Now, I'm not saying this strategy was anything on par with say… the discovery of fire. I'm sure you may have seen this kind of limited access strategy used in restrooms before, maybe in places like public arenas or highway service plazas.

It may not seem like a 'new' thing or 'big' thing, except when you stop to think about how often you see OTHER obvious opportunities to save time and money like the one in the airport…get completely missed.

Maybe no one is 'seeing' it. Maybe no one is saying anything about it. Either way, it's being missed.

It makes you wonder how long it took before someone sitting in a meeting at the airport finally raised their hand and said “Hey, if we roped off part of the restroom we could cut our cleaning time….”.

Common sense isn't always as common as we'd like. Obvious solutions sometimes only seem obvious after the fact.

What can we do?

We can start by trying to think of new solutions to our old, nagging cleaning problems. And since two heads are always better than one, we can begin to ask others to help us come up with these new solutions as well.

Make sense? Yep, makes cents.