Believe it or ELSE, I'm old enough to recall when auto-flush urinals FIRST arrived on the scene.
At first, we were puzzled about one tiny aspect of the expensive remodeling project at the newspaper where I worked (those where the days, eh?). The conundrum arose when we couldn't find the flush handle.
Well, the men couldn't, anyway, because only urinals had the heat sensors to signal to the flushers that the depositor had just stepped away from the "window." No such luck for the women (and the men who opted for the sitting position), who still had to flush manually (or, if you prefer the feminine form, womanually).
So we men — chivalrous to a fault, then as now — would give our female colleagues tours of the men's restrooms in G-rated demonstrations of how the automatic urinals worked. We would put our hand up to the machine above the urinal, then take it away, with the change in temperature telling the machine to flush away.
Then we all would watch, amazed, as the water roared down the alabaster walls of the urinals. Then we would repeat the process: Hand up, hand down; hand up and down; up, and down.
Sometimes, one of the women would be brave enough to try it. But I often detected a feeling of resentment on the women’s parts, although it never rose to the level of urinal envy, so I dismissed it as a natural human tendency that we had something they didn’t. (Just like we men wish soooooooo much that we could, f’rinstance, experience menopause. And I'll always wonder why that isn't called womenopause.)
I realize now that, perhaps, we should have been fearful instead of flabbergasted at the new machine. And we might have been, if we had only known then what we know now.
Indeed, I am not afraid to state flat-out that automatic toilets have spoiled us to no end. (I speak only as a man in this case, as I have no idea what goes on behind closed doors of women's johns.)
You see, those automatic flushers — now ubiquitous in both men's and women's facilities (I've heard) — have spoiled us. We've become so accustomed to the electronic eyes' being our bathroom butlers that we forget how to flush ourselves.
Oh, not at home. That's not a matter of forgetting so much as a battle of the sexes; personally, I fail to see the need to flush EVERY time.
But out in the rare public facilities that still us manual flushers for one reason or another, many of us men just forget to flush as we zip up to zip off about our business. So the next guy thinks we're rude when we're not; we're actually just spoiled.
Same thing with automatic doors. I learned THAT lesson the day I walked full-tilt into the glass door of a store that didn't have the robotic door openers. I couldn't stop myself in time after I realized the door wasn't opening, and I left a greasy imprint of my face on the window.
So what's all this got to do with grandkids, you say?
For ONE thing, it wasn't all that long ago that, when I was out with Vincent and he needed to go to the can, we had to look far and wide to find one that didn't flush automatically. The autopilots scared him him so much he wouldn’t go NEAR them. (Same thing with the automatic hand dryers.) I think he was afraid of being sucked in.
Of course, now that the lads can flush on their own, they have to learn the art of the appropriate amount of Charmin to pamper their buns.
I was reminded of this the other day when Jack screeched from the bathroom: “Papa MIKE! The toilet is LEAKING.”
I ran in, cursing under my breath (and OVER it), because my concept of a leaky toilet is that either a tank connection is leaking or, even worse, the base is leaking and will require a major fix-it job, including pulling the throne out of the floor.
I was relieved, though, when I turned the corner and saw that the floor was only slightly damp.
The relief grew when Jack said, "OH! Now it's going down."
Of course, we know what that probably means: Some little lad — and I won't name names — had squeezed off more much Charmin than the toilet could chew.
In this case, the toilet fixed itself. And I learned that Jack's definition of leaking is different from mine. So my cup of knowledge runneth over, with his.
P.S.: The following video proves that SOME people have too much time, and toilet paper, on their hands.
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