‘Crowdsource rating of toilet cleanliness’
In his weekly column "The FlipSide", local blogger Belmont Lay lets loose on local politics, culture and society in his weekly musings. To be taken with a pinch of salt and with parental permission advised. In this post, he tackles the topic of rating toilets.
The National Environment Agency (NEA) will be conducting more inspections of loos for their cleanliness after the Restroom Association of Singapore (RAS) recommended a compulsory grading scheme to be implemented for all public toilets.
Currently, toilets get inspected once a month. This is expected to increase to three times a month for dirty toilets.
What a giant leap forward for mankind, right?
No.
In fact, getting NEA inspectors to rate the cleanliness of toilets is the most primitive idea I've encountered since last week.
That was when someone thought it wise not to lay out a time frame for calling for a by-election in Hougang.
But I digress.
Think: toilets have not varied much in terms of concept even with technology advancing so much these days.
As we speak, it is already possible for you to buy a car that can park itself.
Most of our handphones are cameras and the Internet all rolled into one.
And you can turn yourself into a hotspot even when you are not engaging in virtual hanky panky with complete strangers via your smartphone as you are tethering.
If you have absolutely no idea what the previous sentence meant, I'm sorry, but you're comparatively as up to speed in terms of innovation as a toilet manufacturer.
In other words, not very.
Toilets, you see, have been that same way since time immemorial.
That would be the 1960s, to be exact.
The design hasn't changed much. No one, it seems, thought about making things more advanced or sophisticated.
The Japanese did put some fancy knobs with jet sprays, but that idea is mainly a Japanese fetish.
So pardon them, shall we?
However, if toilets are not advanced or sophisticated, it doesn't mean the manner of inspecting toilets for cleanliness has to be that way as well.
Crowdsource toilet inspections
The following is an idea I would very much like to claim complete credit for being original.
But I believe someone smarter than me would have thought about this before and could actually make it come to pass: simply create an app where everyone can participate in rating toilets, thereby producing an automated hierarchy of the cleanest toilets in Singapore.
This method of aggregating information is commonly known as "crowdsourcing", and kind of like HungryGoWhere, but for toilets.
The benefits are obvious. Making an app is a one-time investment.
Giving it away for free will encourage people to use it.
Implementing a rewards system for participating in rating cleanliness will encourage people to use it obsessively and regularly.
For example, compulsive toilet raters can collect and use their virtual tokens received from each rating to buy NEA limited edition National Day toilet paper come 9 August, for example.
This task of checking cleanliness, can therefore, be made more sophisticated and outsourced.
There will then be no need to hire stern-looking people, who will be required to maintain a poker face every time he or she claims to be a professional toilet inspector.
Everyone can play a part
If you're hanging out at Raffles Hotel, for instance, and you like the way their toilet smells, use the app and feel free to bless it with a 5-star rating.
And for people who are finding it hard to keep it in any longer and who own the app, they can check it to show where are the cleanest toilets in the vicinity they're in and they can head there to bleed the dragon or bomb the base.
Toilets that score low or are unrated will be avoided by all means because no one wants to take the time to head to a dubious location only to find floaters mingling with some sinkers.
Or some used condoms.
And here is the money shot.
Toilets that have a high rating are naturally well maintained already and will be frequented more often thereafter.
The establishments that own these toilets will either have to put in more resources to uphold their pride and joy, or simply do enough to not let the quality slide.
And that, my friends, is the brilliant outcome of what is bound to be the award-winning, earth-shattering idea of the century: places that are dirty will be frequented less often and naturally get cleaner over time.
A toilet that cleans itself is an innovation I want to see. If that cannot be achieved just yet, dissuading people to not use one is just as good for now.
But herein lies the point of today's missive: A clean toilet is like Singapore.
It is one thing to promote our country to the world as the place to be to do business.
It is another thing for its people to bear the brunt of consistently keeping it attractive.
Which is increasingly difficult.
Simple, right?
Belmont Lay is one of the editors of New Nation, an online publication that insists it is providing you Asian perspectives in an ever-changing landscape but is in fact just stealing slogans.
