Not A Bicycle Built For Two

"Tandem" urinal-sink

Kaspars Jursons is the Latvian designer of the "Tandem", a combination urinal-sink.  Jursons says the idea is water conservation, because the tandem will let users "wash the hands and rinse the urinal at the same time."  After peeing, you wash up in the sink on top and -- voila! -- that wash water rinses the thing out.  OK, a little weird, but I guess it would conserve some water.


As a boy, Buster was an inadvertent early adopter of the same concept.

Around the age of 8, I was sent for week to a summer camp.  It had a large, communal boys bathroom with all the necessary facilities.  Early on my first day, I left my cabin and went to the bathroom to pee.  Looking around, I noticed two things:  I was the only one in the bathroom, and there was nothing in it resembling a toilet or urinal.  There was just this big, round bowl thing in the middle of the room.  Had to be four or five feet in diameter.  It had a metal bar or treadle surrounding its base.  If you stepped on it, water sprayed down from above into the big bowl.  I decided this thingamajig must be the urinal, and so I walked over and began to relieve myself.

At that precise moment, an older boy walked in, stepped up to the bowl and started to brush his teeth.  Then he noticed me and, through a mouthful of Colgate, angrily asked me why I was pissing in the sink! 

Just a sink

Didn't look like any sink I'd ever seen.  I found out later that the toilets were around the corner in another section of that same large restroom.  Who knew?  Not me, that's for sure.

Just a young water-conservationist ahead of his time!