Kate’s Escapades – to flush or not to flush

Today dear readers, I am stooping to a new all-time personal low here on Coffee Break. (Liz reached this low months back with her Gotta go? story.) Until now, I have refrained, suppressed and tolerated, but I think it’s high time we bring a problem of this magnitude out into the open. Surely others of you have found yourselves in the same uncomfortable predicament.

So what’s my topic for today? Automatic flush toilets in public restrooms, of course. Yep, you read that right. I’m gonna talk about toilets today. What’s my complaint? It’s that those wonderful inventions, the automatic flush toilets, just can’t seem to  flush at the appropriate time.

Aren’t you glad you stopped by Coffee Break today?

In this germ-a-phobic society, automatic flush toilets are seemingly a necessity. No more touching the toilet to flush. (Of course this doesn’t get rid of the germs on the toilet paper holder or the stall door, but I’m sure they’ll figure out how to automate, and mess those up, too.) So here’s my main complaint. The toilets just can’t tell when to flush.

The problem often starts upon entering the stall. As soon as your body enters the toilet’s red laser zone…whoosh. There goes the the first flush. Next the tricky part – the paper toilet seat cover. You place it carefully on the toilet seat and quickly turn around and prepare to take a seat, but inevitably before you make it to a sitting position…whoosh again, there goes the paper seat cover with the flush. So you try it again, this time being careful not to ever move your body from the center of the toilet so as to not put yourself out of laser range, and take a seat.

Then onto “the business” at hand, but inevitably before “the business” is done…you guessed it…whoosh again. Now it wouldn’t be so bad if these toilets flushed like regular toilets, but no, these are turbo charged power flushers, sure to spray stuff you don’t want to have sprayed. So then to you try to dry yourself off, but in doing so you  leave the laser zone and…whoosh once again.

Come on people, aren’t we trying to conserve water or something like that? Isn’t there some sort of water conservation agency that we can anger into protesting these automatic flushers?

Then when you do get finally get finished, and the timing is appropriate, the dang toilet won’t flush. So you move around in the stall doing your flush toilet, flush dance, to no avail, and then you try the hand wave in front of the sensor, which also never works. And finally you resort to trying to find a little button to push to trigger the flush, which truthfully defeats the whole purpose of the automatic flushing toilet, now doesn’t it?!?!

In an attempt to be fair and unbiased…heehee…here’s a professional opinion.

“Still, in the long run, automatic flushing keeps the bowl cleaner than if an unflushed toilet sat around for a long time and the next user then came in and manually flushed it, ” said Harley A. Rotbart, a professor of microbiology and pediatric infectious diseases at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. (Chicago Tribune)

Are you guys and gals as annoyed by these automatic flush toilets as I am? I say let’s stand up and be heard (or maybe more appropriately, sit down and be heard). Leave me a comment. Let me know I’m not alone.

~Kate

Enjoy your coffee break.

*As always, just leave a comment on this post, or any other post for that matter, and be automatically entered in this week’s giveaway.