|
There is an age old complaint about men leaving the toilet seat up. And I have a few thoughts on the matter.
First of all, I don't even know if this is still a valid complaint or if this complaint has passed into this country's collective pool of stereotypical behavior along with "women drivers" and "long haired hippy". There can't be a man alive (Simpsons reference: Burns' slant oil drilling operation fills Moe's with noxious fumes. Protective-suited EPA officials burst in and exclaim: Man alive, there are... men alive in here!) who isn't aware that women like to always have the toilet seat returned to the down position. Is this complaint only kept alive by the routines of bad comedians? (The bad comedian itself being a member of the collective pool of stereotypes.)
I've never had any woman complain to me about leaving the seat up. Because my mom showed my brother and me something very elementary about the average toilet, something you've probably noticed all by yourself. It has a lid. When you are done with the toilet, (male or female) close the lid. You close the lid, you obviously have to put the seat down. Duh, done. It really can't be any simpler than that. I mean what is the sense of having the lid on a toilet if you aren't going to use it? Getting back to the bad comedian routine for a minute, when I first heard the jokes by those irate female comedians (comediennes?) I didn't really understand them. I couldn't figure out how you could close the lid without putting the toilet seat down. It never even occurred to me that people didn't use the lid. I never understood that people like to have bowls of germ filled water sitting open in their homes.
Although I am now finding later in life that most of the women in my family (Excluding my wife and mom.... oh, and Annabel. She isn't really using the toilet yet) like to leave the toilet lid up. They just do their business, flush and walk away. And when they flush they are sending plumes of microscopic germs spewing up out of the toilet and into the air. Even Claudine was kind of surprised when I told here about the lid concept. She was kind of like ".... oh yeah. Huh. That makes sense." But she's happy that she's never dropped that extra couple inches and sat her ass down in cold water in the middle of the night. Because, you see, she has to open the lid first.
I was so trained by my mom to life something before I had to go that I never even realized that the U-shaped seats on public toilets were designed for the singular purpose that you wouldn't have to lift them before going. That slot is there for to handle the flying urine zone of a standing male (or weird female). But that made me think that the whole seat thing makes no sense at all. In a public toilet, just because the front of the seat isn't there like it is in a typical residential toilet, you still have to get it over the rim of the bowl. And if you have to get it over the rim of the bowl, you can certainly get it over the edge of a seat. So why have a seat that lifts up at all? I mean,, the hole of the seat isn't that much smaller that the rim of the bowl itself. Why don't they just make a permanent seat right on the bowl? I don't really care either way, as long as when you are at my house, you close the lid.
|
