It’s totally understandable that some bathrooms have finicky plumbing that requires a little extra care, but the toilet instructions in this particular coffee shop restroom are frankly beyond the pale: This bathroom sign seems to declare that absolutely nothing can be flushed down the toilet for any reason.
Yeah, we’re kinda at a loss for what to do here.
Marnie’s Cafe in Wilmington, Delaware has a multi-stall restroom that patrons are encouraged to enter by picking up a key attached to a ladle near the coffee bar, but once inside, bathroom users are faced with a typewritten sign that seems to suggest that they are not even allowed to flush the merest trickle of pee down the rickety porcelain toilets. The sign starts out with a pretty typical admonition, reading “Our pipes are SENSITIVE. Please do NOT flush feminine products or paper towels.” But the next sentence, which says that “paper products of ANY KIND should not go near our toilets,” seems to rule out toilet paper as well, and a further line reading “NO solids. NO liquids. EVEN in an emergency” suggests that you can’t really piss or shit in the toilet either—or if you do, you definitely can’t flush it. Still, the sign says, “Thank you for helping keep our bathroom in working order” at the bottom, meaning that the proprietors must want people to use it—we just have no idea how.
Pissing is out, shitting is out. Those are kind of the only options, right?
We don’t know what to make of this. Do the people at Marnie’s Cafe just want people to use their bathroom as a place to sit for a couple minutes as a break? The sign says in no uncertain terms that basically nothing can go down the pipes, so that’s all we can really imagine doing in there. This is definitely an awkward situation for anyone who needs to go to the bathroom, but the signage is pretty clear. Best of luck if you ever end up at Marnie’s with a full bladder!
