The Wasteful Flush
Pardon the unpleasant topic, but this is something we all do, every day, and it should be done regularly and well. But my office building recently installed automatic flushing mechanisms on the toilets and urinals in our building, and each day I get angrier about it.
On the urinals, they are fine. You stand there, take your leak, shake twice, put it away, and walk away. And only after you have stepped away from the urinal, does the auto-flush system recognize that you are no longer standing there, and then does it’s job and flushes. No hands, no fuss, no waste.
But on the toilets, auto flushers are a disaster. You sit down, drop a stool (good word eh?), stand up to do the paper work…and FLUSH!!! Wait, I’m not done, I have a handful of used toilet paper here! So you finish the cleanup work, drop the paper in the toilet, and use the manual override button to flush once again. Two flushes, a BM interrupted by one of them, and you still have to touch something unless you want to leave a bowl of dirty wet toilet paper for the next visitor.
WTF? Really, am I doing it wrong?
I turned to the Google to research, and found this interesting blog post titled ‘How to Wipe Your Ass‘, in which a survey of 259 individuals explored their various techniques; standing or sitting, and wiping direction. I’m not going to get into direction, but I was interested to see that of the 185 men surveyed, sitting while wiping beat out standing 132 to 53.
So us standing wipers are in the minority, but a significant enough one to not be ignored. I’m not going to change my technique developed since mom handed over the job to me as a toddler, just because the Zurn auto-flusher’s electric eye sees light between my legs when I stand up!
The Google search was very interesting, and I was glad to find I was not the only one outraged over this. And I was glad also to see a simple and satisfactory solution suggested, the foot-pedal flush. I have a dream, that one day I will have both the ability to avoid touching bathroom fixtures unnecessarily with my hands, but also be the master of my own flush. You just have to believe.
For further reading:
The Crappiest Invention of All Time
Slate Magazine, 3/7/2006
Standing vs. Sitting: How Do YOU Wipe?
Collegehumor.com, 4/5/2007