Cockroaches, cloggings & ‘crime scenes’: S’poreans share their public toilet horror stories

We’ve all been there.

You’re out living your best life, when suddenly nature calls.

If you’re lucky it’s a number one — a quick trip to the bathroom to relieve yourself.

If not, you’re in for a longer session.

Either way, whenever you’re out and about, any visit to a public toilet is likely to be accompanied by the following thought and prayer: “I hope it's clean.”

Unfortunately, we know this isn’t always the case.

PG stories

A quick survey of my colleagues proves this; our company group chat was bursting with public toilet horror stories for a good few hours.

Top amongst female users of toilets were the appearance of cockroaches, who have a habit of scurrying out of their lairs just as one has taken a rather vulnerable position atop a toilet bowl.

For the males, encountering a clogged urinal seemed to be a rather common experience.

In fact, I have spotted it overflowing many a-time, spilling its watery contents onto the floor of the toilet.

But none of these incidents compare to one recounted by Tom (not his real name) in Human Resources.

While Tom is known within Mothership for his empathy and compassion for all things human, his experience at a toilet one fateful day in the Fullerton area left him questioning everything he thought he understood about mankind.

For the squeamish, please skip ahead.

M-18 story

While taking a walk with some friends one evening along Marina Bay, Tom found himself needing to use the area’s public amenities.

A foul smell emanated from the entrance of the toilet, but he really had to go.

“I ignored (the smell) and opened one of the cubicle doors. It gave me the shock of my life,” he recalled.

The sight he described can be surmised in two words: Poop everywhere.

“On the cubicle walls on either side, all over the toilet bowl itself, and even on the top wall above the toilet bowl.

It looked like someone just opened the door, turned around, bent forward, and fired a shotgun loaded with poop all over the cubicle.”

Almost like it was the scene of a crime.

Tom, now fondly known as the “lucky” guy, merely wishes that people can have the decency to clean up after themselves.

“If you wouldn’t do it at home, don’t do it in a public toilet.”

The good news

Thankfully, efforts to improve the hygiene standards of our public toilets have been ongoing — and are about to ramp up.

The Neighbourhood Toilets Community Group (NTCG) is an initiative by the Public

Hygiene Council (PHC) that aims to drive collective responsibility and ownership to improve public toilet cleanliness.

NTCG does this through forging partnerships between coffeeshop operators and the local community, setting out clearly defined roles and responsibilities to jointly care for public toilets.

This includes operators stepping up their cleaning regimes for toilets while community volunteers monitor the toilet’s cleanliness and the working conditions of amenities like taps and flushes.

Additionally, volunteers engage users to remind them to use the toilets ​​conscientiously.

While operators can upgrade their infrastructure and increase their cleaning frequency, all these will be futile without the public’s cooperation.

Like in Tom’s case, it only takes one irresponsible person to mess up the toilet.

A simple advice from Tom? Don’t do “shitty” things in public.

If everyone does their part to use toilets responsibly, Tom believes there wouldn’t be too much of a dirty toilet.

The initiative will be rolled out at more bus interchanges and MRT stations in 2025, having been implemented at Serangoon and Tampines interchanges and Macpherson, Geylang Bahru, and Hougang MRT stations in 2024.

PHC introduced the first NTCG pilot trial in April 2022 — in partnership with Yuhua Citizens' Consultative Committee (CCC), Jurong-Clementi Town Council, and grassroots Organisations — at three coffeeshops in Jurong.

Four more Broadway coffeeshops came on board in 2023.

PHC intends to leverage its networks and the coffeeshop merchant associations to onboard more coffeeshops and volunteers into the programme.

Find out more about NTCG, PHC and their programmes here.

Writing this Public Hygiene Council-sponsored article made the writer grateful that his horror story was only rated PG.

Top image from Canva