One of my biggest chagrins is walking into a business and desperately asking for a bathroom, pleading eyes and bambi lashes in full effect, only to have the owner purse her lips and coldly say,

“Sorry, we don’t allow customers to use the rest room.”

Now, I like to pride myself on being a camel. I can go for long periods without drinking water – three hour hikes on sweltering days, you name it – and I often chuckle shamelessly over those gaggle of girls that are often seen traipsing to the ladies’ room four, five, sometimes six times a day (Note: on average, a person goes to the bathroom six times per day – am I laughing now?).  However, bathrooms aren’t exactly advertised, and since most businesses either don’t allow bathroom use or only relent for paying customers, finding a public bathroom is like finding a pay phone these days: a recipe for disaster. But before I start pitching my film idea for Indiana Jones and the Quest for the Royal Throne, let it be known there is a better way.

Sit or Squat by Densebrain is an iPhone app so original and helpful I nearly – pardon the crude, scatological humor – wet my pants. With its humorous imagery, Sit or Squat is a user-reviewed and user-updated website that maintains a database of public toilets around the world, so you can breathe a sigh of relief. Now available as a mobile app, finding a bathroom so you may relieve that case of Montezuma’s Revenge, or little Timmy’s stomach flu, or you bursting from one too many café au laits, is easy breezy. It’s even sponsored by Charmin, the toilet paper everyone wants to guiltily indulge in, with its quilted, triple-ply, cotton candy cloud softness and cuddly mascot bears.

Sit or Squat will map your current location, with any nearby bathrooms flagged in different colors depending on their rating (green indicates a five-star bathroom, whereas yellow will often indicate no rating, or go at your own risk!). If you’d rather read through a list of all the nearby bathrooms at your disposal, tap the Search tab to navigate away from the map. For my location, my closest option would be the Starbucks downtown, 3014 feet away – thankfully, Starbucks doesn’t require you to be paying customer, unless you run into the more stingy of employees -, along with the rather poorly rated D & S Lakeville gas station, and the 5 star rated Whole Foods. For each toilet, features like seat covers, single room, auto flush, baby changing station, and handicap access may or may not be included, and a short description is provided along with a picture to give you some precursory ambience of the restroom you’re about to take up residence in for a short while.

Pictures, you say? That’s right, pictures of toilets litter this app is some ludicrous cornucopia of gleaming white porcelain, but I’ll admit when looking at the nearby Whole Foods facilities, I found myself nodding in impressed approval over the classy juxtaposition of forest green tile with terra cotta walls, auto flush toilets, and a state of impeccable cleanliness. We’ve all seen the horrors of ill-kempt gas station bathroom, with their stale and dehydrated urine stench, mysteriously wet floors, and drawings of certain paraphernalia or human anatomy on the mirrors and walls. I’ll definitely jump into a Whole Foods over a gas station next time I’m suffering from a near burst bladder on my next road trip.

It’s only too bad that smaller towns will find themselves faced with more unrated than rated toilet, so users take note: when you have a fondness for a certain bathroom, remember to take pictures and add to the Sit and Squat global toilet universe (this isn’t entirely tongue-in-cheek). Next time you find yourself in need of a bathroom, whether you’re traveling or simply shopping in your hometown, Sit or Squat will help you while squeezing out a chuckle with its decidedly piquant humor. When public bathrooms are so hidden from the public eye that certain places, out of etiquette, won’t even refer to them as bathrooms, calling them instead the more refined and neutral restroom or washroom, Sit or Squat will be your toilet companion. After all, when you gotta go, you gotta go.