When I was downtown in Graz, Austria, I was forced to use the public restroom in the town square. I was expecting something terrible, but it was incredibly clean. The surprise was when I turned to enter a stall, I discovered that none of the stalls had handles! They had a matron who had an office in between the men’s and women’s room. She kept the place spotless, and I also had to go see her in order to get her to open the stall. She was the best anti-sex, anti-rowdiness, anti-filthiness system that you could imagine.
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I’m reminded of the short story where the zombie apocalypse happens and folks just learn to live with it, mostly. They just have to wear explosive death-sensor collars in case they die and zombify before anyone notices.
Only, the collars sensors are a little overly sensitive and occasionally give false positives for death. So the narrator advises readers to always “act lively” so the collar won’t blow your head off.
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Is the Académie française too squeamish to have produced a stilted and questionably popular alternative to using a sinister xeno loanword; or are the P&O Ferries management just the types not to care?
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Today I learned that rough sleeping is a UK euphemism for homelessness, not someone who jerks around like they are having sex while asleep.
St. Marys church in San Francisco used to use sprinklers to keep homeless from sleeping on their steps, until it hit the news and they realized what assholes they were.
My prediction is that the undoing of these robonannies will be the kids who figure out how to have some sprinkler fun, and the transients who figure out how to get a free shower. And what kind of pervert is turned off by shower sex anyway?
Basically it’s free showers for people who get sexy.
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And some people will find the extra noise and water jets enhance the sex. You just know it will be someone’s special fetish.
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Because Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere might be having a good time.
(Apologies to H.L. Mencken, but I think he would approve.)
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Let the games begin.
One award for who can make the door and sprinklers set off first, and one award for stealth.
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I looks like cottagers in this Welsh resort town will have no Porth of Cawl. 
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How to tell the difference between two slim people getting it on, and one large person suffering from constipation?
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Weight distribution. Even severely overweight people have no bigger feet.
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Why wouldn’t have the collar have an option to disarm it with a captcha?
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An, “I am not a Zombie” check box or “Tick the images that do not contain pictures of a human brain”? 
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Something like that. The classical movie zombie was pretty brainless, they would fail the simplest captcha. Something like “press the left button twice” should suffice. Also, o assume that this happens after a apocalypse, but without a cure. So a frigging loud alarm like on a smoke detector would be also in order, waking a person who fell asleep outside their lockable room. Because that would be the 2nd safety: no sleeping except in rooms that can’t be unlocked by the undead.
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These systems all sound expensive. It would be much cheaper to just widely publicize that they’re doing them… and then not.
Just don’t suggest that out loud…
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While I find public sex unsavory, if you’re so hard up for a place to do it that a public bathroom (oh I just threw up a little…) is your best option, I say let them do it.
I think the story suggested the manufacturing facilities were pre-apocalypse and ability to improve the technology had been severely hampered since the zombies. Which does raise the unanswered question of who was building neck explosives before the crisis.
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The American prison industry?
But wait… isn’t that what public restrooms are for?
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This is part of the “does not theoretically work” problem.
This is part of the “does not work when put into practice” problem. They don’t just need a weight sensor, they need one that can distinguish between two sets of feet, with a resolution fine enough that they can still do so even when the feet are practically (or actually) on top of each other.
It’s not that such a system is impossible, it’s just absurdly expensive, and complex enough that parts of it will routinely fail, causing the whole thing to not work without constant, expensive upkeep (and likely even then).
As I said, that does seem like the most likely explanation for what they’re actually doing here…
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Probably not too absurdly expensive these days - other than the fact that the custom application of the parts will probably involve a hugely inflated price.
Now if this was the only way to detect people having sex then I bet it would be considered affordable at any price. However the indiscriminate system probably is good enough for those making the decisions. After all I doubt they are going to be using those toilets.
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