Urinals in gym or swimming pool toilets have an unusual property about them when compared to common or garden urinals in other locations(though the garden urinal is exceptionally rare, most men preferring to simply use the garden). In these places of sporting activity a man tends to go to the toilet bare foot. Thus regular weeing spillage takes on a totally different aspect to in a normal urinal based toilet facility. It just takes one man to wee carelessly and he sets into motion a course of events that inevitably exacerbates the problem. Because the next man to use the urinal will spot the spillage on the floor and be conscious that he does not want to touch another person's wee with his bare foot (unless he is strange and kinky and suffers from the rarely twinned foot and urine fetish) and so will tend to wee from a little further back than he usually would.
Of course such reckless behaviour slightly increases his chances of also missing the urinal, and by further than the previous occupant of the swimming pool/gym lavatory. Thus the next occupant will again be conscious of the proximity of foreign wee and his own bare foot and be forced to take a standing position slightly further back still, again increasing the chances of more wee spillage even further from the urinal. And so on. It increases exponentially. Someone should study this phenomena and make some kind of graph. As I believe I am the first to officially note down this occurrence I would like it if the mathematical law that was created by this study could be known as "the Herring effect". In the past I have found myself being forced to stand up to two feet away from a swimming pool urinal (and I think the Herring effect is heightened in a swimming pool a) because more children tend to use the urinals and are i) generally less accurate with their wee than their adult counterparts (this is not a solid scientific constant I am afraid) and ii) have more of a phobia of other people's urine and tend to stand even further away from the urinals than is strictly necessary;
and b)because swimming trunks have no fly and pulling them down to wee can often cause unusual urethral blockages and tampering, making it more likely for wee to shoot off in different directions or to dribble at the commencement of each act of urination.
Today as I observed and finally identified this phenomena at my gym (where men do everything barefoot from weeing, to applying moisturiser to drying their testicles with a hair dryer - though this might explain why that man all those months ago also chose to dry the soles of his feet) I wondered why someone doesn't design a better urinal for gym use. Rather than being a little bowl, stuck to the wall, why is the gym/swimming pool urinal not in the shape of a large inverted demi-cone, which leads down to a point at the bottom through which the unwanted effluent is taken to the sewers. The top of the wide brimmed cone should start at a level just below the height of a standing man's penis (as with the common urinal type we could have a small boy/person of restricted height/person of exceptionally long flaccid penis version which starts loweer down). The man would then stand above the demi-cone, being able to stand very close to it whether barefoot or shod and wee downwards into the swimming pool/gym urinal. All but the most extreme misdirection or spillage would fall into the cone and drain downwards along with the other wee. Any splashback would in fact go forwards to the wall, where again it would drain downwards, rather than finding itself all over the floor or skin/clothing of the urinator.
In fact my inverted demi-cone idea seems a more efficient model for all urinal systems and I can't for the life of me understand why anyone hasn't thought of it before.
As with my idea of hair gel and shampoo all in one (which amazingly no-one has yet manufactured) I put my inverted demi-cone urinal (urconal?) into the public arena and if anyone wants to make and market them my reward will be the satisfaction of having helped mankind and toilet cleaners everywhere. When my scanner is working I will add some diagrams of what I imagine this device would look like. I welcome any suggestions of why my idea would be impractical. I really can't think of any at the moment.
It could be made of any material as far as I can see. Provided that the material did not absorb liquid (eg paper or sponge). Enamel, (non-rusting) metal or plastic would seem ideal, as is used in the other soon to be obsolete urinals that men are familiar with today, but will be laughed at by small children of the future when they are exhibited in museums. The children having been taught the Herring Effect in schools will find the old designs doubly ludicrous and doubtless the next time they use a urconal will remark how the design is quite good.
