Hello All,
New here - and male too, but I'm assured that's okay! I'm a dad of a 10-year old boy although sadly, we didn't spend much time together in the early years but that's all changed now and none the worse for the past. Not that it was ever tough-going, just that things could have been better with a greater effort. I often have a look round here and the ex is here too but unidentified to me, and probably rightly so.
One of the women at work has a real bee-in-the-bonnet, if that's an okay thing to say, about the lack of public loo facilities and in fact, she led a successful little campaign where she lived, near Shepperton in Surrey, I think, to get public facilities installed in one of the shops as there was nothing in the town itself.
Last week she found on a website forum (a sports one, no less, which has made us all see her in a different light as she's always claimed to be a football-hater!) the most horrendous story of a shop-keeper refusing to let someone use their shop toilet for a wee. The tale is not a good one and has an unpleasant ending. So what's new, I hear you say. I bet most of you will have heard something not too dissimilar before. Well, what's a bit different is that the unfortunate 'asker' was a bloke, a young bloke and not just a member of the public but one of our 'boys-in-blue'. It's an astonishing story and makes quite hard reading.
I don't know how appropriate it would be to re-tell the details here, or provide a link, but we had a discussion in the office and our Facilities Champ said we should tell it on mumsnet to show up such uncalled for and ignorant refusals, as well as showing that absolutely anyone can be a victim. As I've been meaning to post for ages, I volunteered!
I won't offer any more details initially in case there's no need or no call but the message is that there's clearly still a lot of educating to be done with some shop/store owners/workers. Excluding any occasions when it's the little 'uns who need to go, it seems like us adults also have requests refused sometimes.