Potty Talk

Today it's time for some potty talk.  Now before you get the soap to wash my mouth out, I literally mean talking about toilets.

Toilets here are either better than American toilets, or a huge step down, literally.

First the bad news: many older buildings have squat toilets.  To make the bad news worse, every school I work in is an old building.  Of all the luck.

Now for the good news.  Imagine it is January and your house is cool.  You need to go to the bathroom.  You drop your long underwear, take a deep breath, brace your self for it....and then plunk down on the ice cold toilet seat.  Not here, my friends.  Here toilet seats are heated.  So far every western style toilet I have used has had a thermostat built in.  Heated seats are not the only perk. 

At a roadside rest stop the toilet seat had a thermostat, a bidet, bidet temperature controls, and an emergency call button in case an elderly person needed help.  All the buttons were on a little arm rest that folded up and down.  It looked like the control panel for the starship Enterprise.  There were other buttons, but they were written in Japanese, so I have no idea what they did.  Every button I just listed I was able to figure out from the pictures. Yep, I was able to figure out the bidet from the button.  You don't want to go blindly pushing buttons.  You might end up with water making a surprise attack from the rear (or on the rear) while a bathroom attendant comes to see if you are okay.  It was the first time I've ever been intimidated by a toilet.  The worst thing was that in all those buttons I couldn't find the flush.  I spent a two good minutes looking at the toilet, at the top and sides of the tank, every button on that TI-83 scientific calculator of a toilet controller.  I couldn't find it anywhere!  Finally, dejected and defeated I felt I only had two options left.  The first option: I could press the emergency help button.  I went with option two, which was to leave the stall and head for the exit as fast as I could before anyone else tried to use that stall.

Before you get too jealous of heated toilet seats, let me temper your enthusiasm.  Let's just say that if you want to drive a Cadillac, you have to pay for it.  At the hardware store, the basic heated toilet seat costs $80 bucks.  They run all the way up to $250.

The temptation during this email to add puns and jokes was monumental.  I'm sure you thought of a few yourself.  Feel free to post them in the comments.  If you start posting toilet puns, I'll post all the ones I ommited.