The Unlocated Toilet

Perhaps when you despair in life, it may be prudent to remember that even a highly venerated and powerful organization like Google can screw up badly.

Maps is one of their premier products which they are heavily advertising currently on the urban billboards. There are big real-time traffic updates on them and what not. But ever since we have known smartphones (last decade or so) I have not seen government-built lavatories listed on their product in basically ninety-five percent of the places I have travelled to! You try it out.

Seems like the nearest place to get rid of some yellow-colored bodily fluids is in a red-light area.

Mind you, the above screenshot is the English-version of the app in a top-tier metropolis. Imagine the case in a more backward town full of people speaking vernacular dialects. All this while, I assumed it was just something that would soon be resolved given the number of times the app keeps updating, but now I have lost my patience and feel compelled to write these lines.

Readers should know that ever since Steve Jobs passed away, Sundar Pichai’s employer has been my favorite company, I have made a YouTube video about how much I like them, have been their student ambassador and would still love to work with them..

But it pains and hurts that they would rather suggest me bars and lounges and ask me to confirm if I am over there so that some machine learning algorithm can be optimized, but not cater to one of the most basic requirements of what is probably their biggest market.

In fact, displaying public toilets will even open the platform for citizens from all backgrounds to rate and review them so that local governments can take informed and specific action.

There are many people dying of infections and women walk through streets on which their own well-paid male employees will not hesitate to urinate on, inebriated and on their way back home from the very gastropubs they keep suggesting. Since the company just fired James Damore, I am sure it would empathize with what I am saying.

I am sorry, but before they do any marketing campaign or publish some fancy interactive doodle for tomorrow (India’s Independence Day), they first must realize that nobody gives two shits about their internet-powered balloons or self-driving cars when their bladders are about to burst.

Or does this ‘user experience’ not matter because there are no shadows or animations? Moonshots are not everything. Get out of the Kurzweil-ian mindset and think about piss-pots as well.

The proper place to do this was a mere hundred meters away — now if only he could seek out where it was in his native tongue other than by finding some random pedestrians and showing them his pinkie finger early in the morning.