Next up: last week the city bolted a new trash can to our sidewalk. They put it in an quite inconvenient place (right in front of where we run our line, and our bike racks, instead of down by the bus shelter where it would do much more good), and we're trying to figure out who to talk to to get it moved.

These are the newly-designed trash cans that you've been hearing about for like five years now. The ones that are so high security that they won't be permanently cracked open and spilling trash everywhere like the old ones. Let's check in on how's that going, shall we:

These are the trash cans that got a lot of terrible reporting from incompetent local journalists, echoed by Fox News and whatnot, claiming that they were $20,000 each, which wasn't true. The prototypes were $20,000 each, which includes both design and a short run of a dozen of them, which is actually a pretty reasonable price for bespoke one-off metal work. When mass-produced, they "hoped" that they would only cost $2k to $3k each, but I don't know what the final price ended up being.

Did they need to be a bespoke design, though? Was "keep the trash inside the can and make them hard to break open" a problem unique to San Francisco, a problem that no other municipality on the planet has ever encountered before? Somehow this seems unlikely.

I think it's fair to say that whatever the final price was, it was too much. They did not achieve the goal they were intended to achieve. Unfit for purpose. They should have just gone with $50 mass-produced open-top cans from the Container Store. The amount of trash spilled on the ground would have been exactly the same.

You know you want in on this, too. Let's see what you can squeeze out.

Also, tune in right now for the fifth annual DNA Lounge Yule Log webcast, 24 hours of fire and music, from 9pm on Christmas Eve to 9pm on Christmas. Come warm yourself by our fire:

We know you have many Yule Log video options in this holiday season, and we thank you for choosing ours.

Oh, the toilets. You hate 'em, we hate 'em.

The following is not an urgent need, but a long-term, persistent, nagging need. One of the things that I sometimes do when asking for donations is identifying large, self-contained projects with a non-open-ended price tag. This approach has worked out well for us several times in the past! (It got us a new dance floor!)

So lemme tell you about toilets. Maybe this will make you want to pay for a slight remodel of our bathrooms.

The problem:

We keep having leaks, which results in the floor getting gross, and stalls being taken out of commission for days until we can get a plumber in to deal with it. The plumber's fixes are all now stopgap measures that don't hold for long. Something has to give.

Background:

As you know, the toilets on the Main Room side of the compound are stainless steel prison toilets. They were very expensive, supposed to last "forever", and are also "suicide proof", "lacking crevices for hiding of contraband", and "foolproof and incapable of error".

"Forever" was overstating it. These toilets are now 23 years old, and we started having issues with some of them after about 10 years. That was not always the toilet's fault, though, but a bad design decision by our plumber back in 2001!

Ok, so, a normal toilet sits on the floor, bolted atop the wax donut on top of the drain hole, and water enters from an external pipe. For a home toilet that's flex tubing that enters the bottom of the tank; for a commercial toilet, that's usually a pipe entering from the top.

The toilets we have are weird in two ways. First, the water enters from the back, hidden behind the toilet itself. (I imagine that hiding the pipe was part of the "suicide-proofing".) Second, the position of the drain is non-standard compared to every other toilet in the world.

Water entering at the back means that these toilets need to be bolted to both the floor and the wall. Which is fine when the floor and the wall are at right angles. Which they once were! But our hundred year old building is sitting on top of sand dunes and the burned out wreckage of the wooden row houses that were here before the 1906 earthquake. Things have shifted, and sometimes we lose seal against the drain, which not only causes leaks but also causes internal corrosion. Flush and repeat.

The standard "rough-in distance" (distance from the wall to the center of the drain) is 12", but our drains are 3" to 4", some with weird custom adapters. It's a hack job.

And here's the super frustrating part about that: it didn't have to be this way! These stainless steel toilets are all bespoke. There's not a warehouse full of them somewhere, they are all made to order. They will absolutely put together a stainless toilet for you that has a standard 12" rough-in, top water entry, and even a toilet seat. But our plumber didn't do that.

This is far from the first time I have suspected that the plumber we had in 2001 was deliberately sabotaging us.

At this point you might think, "Fuck dem toilets, just replace them with porcelain toilets as they fail." Sure! Except... because both the the drain and the water feed are in a non-standard spot, replacing even one toilet means tearing open the wall to move the water pipe; jackhammering up the floor to move the drain; pouring new concrete; and re-tiling everything. Now multiply that by 8.

However, that's the right move! The nonstandard plumbing is the biggest problem. So the right solution to this problem is:

1. Convert all of the plumbing to a standard layout, so that it is even possible to plop a $300 porcelain toilet on top.

2. Then decide what toilet to plop down:

   1. New stainless toilets, with standard plumbing, and with seats. Cost about $3,000 each, last 15-25+ years.

   2. New porcelain toilets, cost $300 each, can be destroyed by a beer bottle dropped from shoulder height.

   That decision rests on what you think the average lifespan of a porcelain toilet will be, versus how much cooler you think the stainless look is. I don't have data on lifespan. It's true that we have not lost a porcelain toilet from the Pizza or Above DNA restrooms, but there are only 4 of those and they get way less traffic than the main room. Like, probably less than 10%.

This is a project that benefits heavily from economies of scale: it's cheaper to tear up the whole floor at once, to re-tile the whole wall at once, etc. than do it one stall at a time.

So we figure that phase one of the operation, "fix the stupid plumbing configuration in all stalls", probably costs around $25k all in.

Then phase two, replace the toilets themselves, costs either $3k or $20k, depending on whether we go with 2-year porcelain, or 2-decade stainless.

So, who's in? Would you like to be the hero who makes our bathrooms ride eternal, shiny and chrome?