There was a post in one of my groups on FB of a video showing some little girl who was pissed off at her dad because he kept leaving the toilet seat up.
Can we just be honest for once about the whole toilet seat thing? I’m sure this goes back to the times of unlighted, unheated outhouses where you used the Sears catalog for paper. And not even back to the early days of outhouses — I’m talking about outhouses that might have been retrofitted with the more modern type of two-piece commode seat rather than just being a hole you hovered over.
But this is the 21st century. The number of homes still relying on outhouses instead of indoor plumbing is probably small enough to count with my fingers and toes. (OK, hyperbole; I don’t live in the holler, or in the ‘stans. But I live in a city with modern plumbing.)
So why can’t women simply look at the damn toilet before they sit down? I mean, all three of ours here are kind of hard to miss, unless you’re just in a daze. It’s not like you can’t see them before you sit. And FFS, ladies (and men, for that matter), don’t you close the lid when you drop the seat? If the lid isn’t closed, isn’t that a kind of a subtle hint that MAYBE you ought to look and see if the seat is down? I mean, what are you gonna do? Sit on the lid and pee?*
In fairness, I do put the seat down. And not because I don’t want to hear shit from my wife; I do so because I don’t want the cats to use the john as a swimming pool or a water feature. But because women think this is such a BIG FUCKING DEAL, let’s think about some things that we men rarely complain about, even though sometimes we yearn wistfully for the days when we were single and didn’t have to deal with this utter crap.
- Never, ever criticize a woman for not rinsing her sink after she brushes her teeth, even after you went to the trouble to fix the drain so it worked and didn’t just leave a pool of water sitting there draining for a quarter of an hour.
- Or for loading the dishwasher full of crusted-over dishes and expecting the 30-minute “quick wash” cycle to clean them. (“We bought it because it said ‘no scrubbing needed’!” “Yeah, but that’s on the full wash that takes three hours, uses a bazillion kilowatts of electricity, and half the water in the county reservoir.” “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”** “Sadly, I do — I read the manual.”)
- Or for insisting on using paper plates instead of our perfectly good Nautica tableware that we got for our wedding because then we don’t waste water to wash them. (Ignoring that manufacturing paper plates uses a ton of water and creates a horrendous amount of toxic waste that someone has to deal with, plus creates air pollution from transport to the store and then to your home, and then after you throw them away they fill up landfills and don’t really decompose. Unintended consequences are a bitch.)
- Or for using the “touch-up” brush on the toilets for weeks while ignoring the build-up under the rim that can only be removed with a jackhammer and muriatic acid when she complains about it, or when I finally realize how bad it is and do it myself.
- Or (and this is a personal favorite — her father warned me before we got married about this) for not turning lights off when she leaves a room, even if she’s not planning to go back there. “You left the lights on over the vanity.” “You were still in the bedroom.” “Yeah, but I wasn’t going back to the vanity, I was dressed and following you out, and you were the last one back there.” “So? You were still in the bedroom.” “Honey, that’s 240 watts of electricity just burning away for nothing.” “So? You were still in the bedroom.”
Should I go on? 🙂
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* Well, maybe some of you will, if you’re that bleary-eyed at 1, 3, and 5 in the morning. But that’s on you. Literally.
** The last refuge of my wife. God love her. Note, however, this statement is usually just a translation of “Fuck you.”