Stehpinkeln ist Verboten!

[robinturner]

Apparently, a German company is manufacturing a device that warns men if they lift the toilet seat. The so-called WC Ghost has a repertoire of threats like "Hey, stand-peeing is not allowed here and will be punished with fines, so if you don't want any trouble, you'd best sit down" (delivered in the voice of Helmut Kohl).

I am resigned to women moaning about our leaving the toilet seat up when gravity is already on their side. I can admit that they sometimes have a point about the stains when we miss, but such problems can be avoided by men remembering to aim carefully and to wipe when they miss, and women not filling the bathroom with silly fluffy rugs whose only purpose is to act as urine traps. But to attempt to abolish "stand-peeing" altogether is outrageous, and the kind of thing that makes crotchety old men go on about how "this women's lib thing has gone too damn' far."

There is also the fact that the manufacturers of this horrendous machine have no grasp of male psychology. A machine that detects your raising of the toilet seat is not an incentive to piss sitting down; it is a challenge to piss standing up without raising the toilet seat.

Comments

[vret.livejournal.com]

I heard about this a while back. As I said then "It is aspirational. It gives you something to aim at".

[cassielsander.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure I could perform with Helmut's voice coming up at me.

[alsoname.livejournal.com]

The toilet seat should be left down, because women always need it to be down, and men need it to be down when they are pooping. Assuming it's shared by men and women equally, the toilet seat needs to be down more than half the time. Ergo, it should be left down.

Sorry for using the p-word. How crude!

[several-bees.livejournal.com]

But that doesn't minimise the total necessary effort at all.

Look at it this way, assuming for the sake of convenience a household with one male and one female who use the toilet equally. If the lid is always left down:
(a) women never have to move it before using it;
(b) men have to move it twice about eighty percent of the time (assuming a fairly reasonable 4:1 wee:poo ratio);
(c) therefore, it has to be moved by someone on 8 occasions out of every 10 split-between-genders toilet visits (those 8 occasions being split into the 4 groups of 2 movements for each time the man urinates).

Whereas if everyone leaves the seat the way it is when they finish using it, it'll be down after six out of ten possible visits (the 5 from the woman, the one non-urinatory visit from the man). So
(a) Women will have to move it before using it 40% of the time, ie 2 times in an average set of five journeys (her five out of the total ten);
(b) Men will have to move it before using it (40% of the time on 20% of occasions) + (60% of the time on 80% of occasions) = 2.8 times in an average set of his five journeys out of the total ten; therefore
(c) There will be a total of 4.8 seat-moves in an average set of 10 toilet visits.

Which comes pretty close to halving the total work expended. Do you really think it's fair to almost double the amount of work and make it entirely the responsibility of the bloke?

It doesn't matter what numbers you use for the wee:poo ratio, nor the gender distribution in the house, nor how often each gender goes; if you leave the seat as it is, it only ever gets moved when it needs to be moved; adding extra arbitrary move-requirements is always going to add work.

[alsoname.livejournal.com]

This is why we should all go gay.

[solri.livejournal.com]

I'm impressed by the maths!

[vret.livejournal.com]

There can be other considerations, though. I used to leave the seat however it ended up, but now I always put the seat down and close the lid. The reason is that I part own a narrow boat and my sister-in-law, who is a sewage engineer and another part owner of the boat, wrote a long explanation for the boat's manual on why closing the lids would significantly reduce the smell from the toilets on it. Of course, it doesn't make any difference with a standard house crapper, but I close them anyway out of habit now.