At the telescope site, things are pretty basic. That's ok... you kinda expect it, but the toilet is something else. The toilet is the bane of my time up at site. Apparently it cost about £10,000, so you might expect it to have a (heated) gold seat or something.
But no.
The toilet is an incinerator. In other words you... do your business... into a gated metal retainer which has a replaceable paper liner. You then close the lid and press a little peddle on one side of the toilet which opens the metal retainer and allows the contents of the toilet to drop through to the section below.
This is where things get nasty. Because below the metal retainer is the incinerator, which of course burns everything pretty quickly. But the smell of evaporating urine is not something to be savoured. And, of course, the room in which the toilet is situated is pretty small, and so constantly smells of the stuff.
And you have to stay in there because you have to replace the paper lining once everything has passed through, amid the hissing and the fumes.
Even worse than this, you're only allowed to flush four or five times an hour, or the incinerator cools down too much to boil the urine as it drops. Oh, and you also have to make sure the heater has been switched on in the first place. I'll leave it to you to imagine what happens if either of these rules are broken.
All in all, I far prefer to go outside.
And you thought astronomy was romantic?
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