Is This Really Necessary?

On Wednesday evening, I took my children and my Indonesian friend Sandra who was visiting us to eat dinner at a French restaurant in my neighborhood that recently opened called Brasserie Cassis.

The food is pretty good if you live in the Plainview area and would like to check it out, though I was disappointed that they changed their menu since the last time I was there and no longer have the crab cake appetizer that I really liked.

But what I find really odd about Brasserie Cassis is that it is the only place I think I have ever been to in this world that has mini flat screen televisions mounted on the wall over the urinals in the men's room! Yep, there are two urinals in the men's room and each one has its own television.

Maybe it is just me, but I fail to see why it is necessary to have television sets mounted on the wall above the urinals in a bathroom. It takes about thirty seconds to a minute at most (depending on how much you have had to drink, of course!) to take a piss. Throw in another minute to wash and dry your hands.

Now, the restaurant business is very competitive, and from what I understand, the proft margins for restaurants are rather low. You would think then that a restaurant owner would want to keep his electricity bill as low as possible. Televisions in a men's room seems like a rather gratuitous waste of electricity to me. I mean, it's not like guys are going to say, "Let's eat at Brasserie Cassis tonight. That way I can catch a few snippets of the Yankee game while I'm taking a whiz."

Mind you, there are two large television screens over the bar already, so it is not like the customers at Brasserie Cassis are deprived of their need to watch the ball game while they are dining on their frog's legs and roast duck. Oh, and I should add that they do not have televisions in the ladies room, as my friend Sandra confirmed for me.