On our first Saturday, the showers ran three stalls, took 24 check-ins, and a typical shower lasted about 15 minutes (see Soft Launch by the Numbers). The stall tile on the Shower Station page shows when each neighbor went in, and that is all it shows. To know who is running long, the volunteer at the stalls has been doing the math against the wall clock, three stalls at a time, while also calling the next name.
The next update to the Shower Station does that math for you. This post is a preview of what is coming, drawn from the design and the build plan. It is not on the station page yet.
What you will see
Every occupied stall gets one more line under the In time: N min left. It counts down against the station’s time limit, one minute at a time, and every stall on the page ticks together.
When a stall’s time runs out, three things happen at once so it catches your eye from across the room:
- The line changes to Time is up.
- The tile’s border turns amber.
- The border pulses, slowly.
Nothing beeps and nothing buzzes. The tile is the signal, and you mark the stall Out the same way you do today. If your phone or tablet is set to reduce motion, the pulse is off; the amber border and the words stay.
The number updates once a minute, not once a second. When a stall reads 1 min left, expect somewhere under a minute. Seconds are on the list for later.
Setting the time limit
A new Time per stall dropdown sits in the Stalls header, next to Add. It offers 10, 15, 20, 30, and 45 minutes, and it starts at 15, which is how long a typical shower ran on our first Saturday.
Anyone working the page can change it: volunteer, team lead, or admin. The person standing at the stalls knows how long a shower should run today, so there is no admin gate on it. Adding and removing stalls stays with team admins, as it is now.
Where the setting lives
The time limit is saved on the device you set it on, in the browser, not on the server. Three things follow from that:
- It sticks. Reload the page or come back later on the same tablet and the limit is still what you set.
- Two tabs agree. Open the station in a second tab on the same device and it picks up the change without a reload.
- Another device starts fresh. A different phone starts at 15 minutes until someone sets it there. On a shared station tablet this never comes up. If the team works from personal phones, agree on the number at the start of the day.
The countdown itself has no such limit. Its start time is the moment the neighbor was seated, which the app already records and shares with every device. Reload the page or open it on another tablet, and the same stall shows the same minutes left.
What stays the same
- The Barber Station is untouched. Chairs show the In time and nothing more.
- Marking a stall Out, calling the next neighbor, and the waiting and missed lists all work exactly as they do today.
- No new information about neighbors is collected. The only new thing saved anywhere is the number you pick from the dropdown, on your own device.
Not in this update
- A sound or vibration when time is up.
- One shared time limit across every device.
- Minutes over or under in the mark-out sheet.
- Seconds on the countdown.
Each of these is on the list for later, once the countdown has run on a real Saturday and we have heard from the volunteers who used it.
When
The countdown is designed and planned. It ships with its own tests and a live run-through on a test copy of the station before it reaches the real page. We will post again when it is live.
If you work the stalls and have an opinion on the presets or the 15-minute default, use the Contact link at the top of any page. This is the moment to change it.