Do you have cameras installed in your bar or restaurant? most probably. In fact, if you don’t, you’re leaving yourself wide open for theft and fraudulent insurance claims. But when does enough become enough? Do you install cameras in your toilets?

Well, the owners of a new bar in Basingstoke in the UK have defended their decision to install a CCTV camera in the men’s toilets.

A customer complained to a local newspaper after spotting the camera in the toilet at Pure Lounge Bar but Ernie Phelps, the bar’s general manager and one of the owners, said the camera was necessary because of vandalism.

He said in the first week of operation, customers snapped off an expensive sink tap in the gent’s lavatories.

He explained: “We have got one camera facing the sink, nowhere else. It’s to try to stop vandalism.”

Well on this occasion, I have to agree with the use of the cameras. Although he may not get away with putting them up in the Ladies Toilets, he’s just trying to protect his business. His predicament is not an isolated one. I reported on an equally unique way to deal with restroom vandalism in a previous post here.

A step too far or another unfortunate necessity in today’s bar industry?

There is something you can be given in a bar that is so disgusting that the very sight of it makes me went to turn on my heel and leave. Something so repulsive that grown men recoil in horror and children start to cry.

I am speaking about the dreaded “Key to the Toilet”!

First of all, any bar that needs a key for it’s toilets is not a bar where you want to see what the kitchens look like and second of all you should never return to such a premises. Ever.

What is so vile that I have been driven to write this post you might ask? Where do I start?

Is it the fact that the bar is in such a bad area that the toilets are at risk of destruction from the mobbing locals? Is it because the key fob is normally the size of your head and you are expected to walk through the bar carrying it like a school punishment? Is it because once you get to the toilet, you have to put it down somewhere, but where can you put it? Where does that mean this key has been over they years?

It is all these things, but it is mostly because it then has to be carried out of the toilet by someone who may not have washed their hands (like it matters at this stage…) and replaced on the bar counter. Can anyone count how many health codes have been broken by now?

Anyone for a sandwich?

The key I was presented with today and only agreed to due to extreme needs: