Airpnp is the worst-designed app I’ve ever used. It’s also the most profound.
Justine Zwiebel/BuzzFeed News
My bladder is the Murphy's Law of organs.
It's not that it's small, exactly; rather, it's disagreeable; neurotic.
It conspires. In cahoots with some quietly disgruntled fold of my brain, the devil bag demands emptying only when it cannot be plausibly emptied. It is as if there is a tiny agoraphobe peering out at all times and the moment he senses he doesn't have a way out — at the movies, on the subway — he pulls the fire alarm.
It shouldn't have to be this way. Ours is an age of technological answers to material problems, deep ones, such as: cannot a person pay a nearby stranger a marginal fee to use his or her private bathroom when he is about to goshdang explode?
Finally, the answer to that question, which I admit to having pondered in desperate circumstances, is: "Yes!"
Allow me to suggest that Airpnp, the new crowdsourced bathroom emergency application, has the potential to dislodge a force far more entrenched than any taxi commission or hospitality industry, which is the power of government to legally forbid you from doing your business in public places, if you're not around a commode when the urge strikes. We live in a country where you can rent the entire history of music for the cost of a panini, but every day millions of citizens are obligated, by municipal law, to agonize silently, unable to do a thing that we literally need to do to not die.
What the hell?
Needing-to-piss stress is a first-order problem, and the fact that a tiny startup from New Orleans is just getting around to it in 2015 gives the lie to the idea that the big tech corps actually have "improving the human condition" high up on the dry-erase board when they're calculating which intractable knot to untie with Objective-C next. There is no lumbering Big Toilet to disrupt, as far as I know, no swirling profits to drain. There are simply devil bags to unburden and anxious minds to ease.
It was with this downright communitarian promise (in the world of startups, at least) in mind that last week I set out, after drinking 20 ounces of coffee and 20 ounces of water, to visit some of the Airpnp pioneers in New York City, where I live.
I wanted to figure out what had moved these early Pnpers to share their most private space with, potentially, 8 million other humans. I wanted to know how other actual New Yorkers' bathrooms compared to mine. And more than anything, I wanted a glimpse of the end of my cold war (mutually assured destruction has, to date, saved me from any accidental detonations) against my bladder.
Before going any further, I should mention that Airpnp is in many ways a terrible application. First, it seems obvious that it will be sued by Airbnb, which is currently getting lots of practice in the courts. Second, it doesn't have Airbnb's kind of geotracking, and it auto-loads New Orleans as its default location because Airpnp headquarters is in New Orleans. Every time. Third — at least in my experience — you have to log in each time you use it, almost as if the app cannot believe someone is taking it seriously. Fourth, Airpnp asks for your credit card number a little bit too often, like an intern wrote it down on a scrap of paper but forgot where he put it. Fifth, and this isn't quite Airpnp's fault, but there simply aren't very many toilets available to use in New York right now. As of this writing, I count 15 in Manhattan, six in Brooklyn, four in Queens, zero in the Bronx and Staten Island. Which makes sense, I guess, since Staten Island is pretty much one big toilet anyway.
The majority of the Airpnp listings in Manhattan are simply public restrooms. That's a useful service, but it already exists in the form of the entirely fine Charmin SitOrSquat app. Public bathrooms are fine, but I wanted to piss in someone's home. I decided to look in the two boroughs with private listings: Brooklyn, where I live, and Queens.
The first bathroom I tried to use was listed by a person in East Williamsburg named Haziq L., and it promised "a toilet, toilet paper, sink, and paper towels." Unfortunately for me, Haziq had set the single-use price of his bathroom at $1000.00, which felt like probably beyond the reasonable limits of the BuzzFeed News expense reimbursement policy (or, at the very least, only worth it in the event of a catastrophic number two).
Next, I tried a few places in Crown Heights, both of which were "unavailable," a vague term that did not clarify whether they were currently in strenuous use or nobody was home to host. Discouraged, and now starting to have to pee quite badly, I found a listing for a bathroom in Bedford-Stuyvesant for a comparatively reasonable $5:
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