One Flush Or Two?

It's been well over a hundred years since the introduction of the flushing toilet, an innovation that, for obvious reasons, greatly improved upon the previous practice of "throwing your shit out of the window". (Although, living as I do on the twentieth floor of an apartment building, I can't help occasionally being tempted.) Since the popularization of the toilet it's been left to the natural processes of competition and market forces to refine and improve on the original. In theory this means that buyers shop around for lower prices, and suppliers are forced to improve their products and lower their costs in order to stay ahead of their competitors, earn higher prices and sustain profitability.

If you buy into that evolutionary theory of product design (survival of the fittest) you would expect that only the very best toilet designs would by now be in production, the others having been consigned to the scrap heap of history, porcelain dinosaurs, never to be flushed again. So why is the toilet in my apartment so completely shit?

It's not as though the fundamental concept is challenging - pull the turds and paper out the bottom, try and rinse any detritus off the bowl and refill with pristine water, with no remnants floating in it. That being the case, why is my toilet designed to fill to the brim and swirl everything around for five seconds before emptying, leaving assorted wreckage all the way up the bowl while failing even to "swallow" the contents fully, resulting in the need for multiple flushes and frequent application of the toilet brush?

I must have taken a dump in more than a thousand different toilets over the years, maybe even five thousand, scattered over the highways and byways of Great Britain, hotels on four continents, airplanes at thirty thousand feet, and other places even I won't mention. I remember being forced (by a previous night's curry) to take an unscheduled stop in a run down town center public toilet. There was no lock on the door, no seat, and a convenient hole, just in case someone was inclined to push their penis through from the adjacent stall. But here's the point - the thing flushed just once and the whole lot disappeared. (And I was glad of it too - I wasn't planning to hang around, in case that penis appeared.) Why is technology that is considered standard for a public bum-fondling rendezvous not considered routine in the equipment installed in expensive houses and apartments?

I tried out one of the toilets in my new house and it's the same. It doesn't take the turds for a magic ride around the rim of the bowl like the one here, but it seems highly disinclined to "swallow". And this is an upmarket toilet. What happened along the way that meant basic technology was lost?

Here's what happened. Remember that "improve performance, lower cost" route to better margins? Well there's another option, namely "fuck performance, lower cost". That doesn't work if you're selling something to the person that will use it AND they have the opportunity to try it out first. It also doesn't work if consumer reports puts out comparisons of product performance. But most people never buy a toilet - it's in the house when you show up, specified by the builder, who doesn't give one solitary fuck whether it flushes well or not, whether your legs fall asleep when you're enthroned, or whether the seat works loose after six months. It's just cost to them.

Even if you want to make a change, what are you going to do? Are you going to ask the assistant in Home Depot if you can take a shit on their display model and see how it flushes? Are you going to have a curry the night before and bring along a newspaper, "to give it a proper test"? I doubt whether most people would even sit on one, trousers on, to test for seat height and comfort. Buying a toilet without sitting on it is like buying a car without getting in it; buying one without flushing is like buying a car without driving it, which is why performance is rewarded in car design - people try before they buy, and the products are rated. You can buy Car and Driver magazine to see comparisons of different products; you can read reviews by experts, and you can compare all the statistics. Where's "Toilet and Flush" magazine when you need it? I don't think you could even ask the Home Depot assistant with a straight face "How does it flush? Will it get everything in one go?"

In the real world no-one replaces toilets unless they want them to match the new design of their bathroom; how they flush isn't even a consideration. Builders only care about what they cost and consumers, when they care at all, only care about how they look. So toilet makers receive no reward for performance at all. Which means that I can't get my shit to flush at the first attempt, and Thomas Crapper must somewhere be swirling in his grave.


Copyright © 2010 Edward Bison

Nothing Downstairs

One of the problems with moving to a new city is that you have to sell your house in the old one. This is quite enough of a pain in the arse in the normal course of things, but when you're in the middle of a housing market meltdown, and the city in question is St.Louis, a place that is often referred to as "a great place to raise a family" simply because there's fuck all else good to say about it, a place that lost its airport hub status and is now admirably served by a fleet of cigar-shaped coffin regional jets, and a place with absolutely no basis for economic growth, things get tougher.

Selling a house is a pain for many and varied reasons: you have to deal with realtors, a life form that ranks slightly above the tick in terms of sheer parasitic uselessness; you have to try and make your house appealing and keep it that way constantly, ready for any potential buyer to show up; and you have to deal with members of the public. I know the "public" is theoretically made up of people, just like you and me, but there's something about that designation that causes people to leave their brains at home, in a jar beside the bed.

Let's take my house, just as a for-instance. It isn't the best house in the world, but it's clean, airy, well-situated, well-maintained, nicely landscaped and priced in line with similar offerings. One thing it does not have, however, is a finished basement, or "finished lower level" in realtor parlance. Now, I remember buying this house nearly fifteen years ago, and the process of house-buying then involved looking at dozens of printed one-page house details, each with one small photograph, and trying to determine which ones it was worth going to check out. Inevitably a whole lot of them weren't even worth going into once you arrived and realized that they were adjacent to a parking lot / school / insane asylum.

Nowadays, however, we have the internet in all its glory. Not only are all the houses listed on Realtor.com, so you can check out multiple pictures, but you can also see Google street views and aerial shots which will tip you off in advance that the reason the house is so cheap is that it's literally side by side with a crappy old gas station. The house details listed will give you numbers of rooms, types of rooms and dimensions of rooms. You can see pictures of many rooms, and after a while you figure out that if you can't see a picture of the important rooms, such as kitchen or bathroom, they must be utterly shit.

So with all this information literally at your fingertips there really is no reason to be completely surprised when you show up, even if the realtors still have the enviable ability to make a postage-stamp yard look like a football field with cunning photography. It's certainly possible to cut down on time wasted looking at houses which don't even meet your basic requirements.

Which brings us back to my unfinished basement. Last week a couple made an appointment to see the house, which necessitated Mrs Bison tidying up and fucking off out for a couple of hours, but no problem because - joy of fucking joys - someone actually wants to see the house. Afterwards you wait with bated breath for the feedback from the visit, and in this case the potential buyer was not interested because the house didn't have a finished lower level, and they really needed one because granny and "failure to launch" kid were going to be moving in too.

Well excuse me for pointing out the fucking obvious, but if you knew you wanted a finished basement, what would make you want to visit a house that didn't have one? It's not as though it's a small detail you might forget, like an aversion to hydrangea bushes or a preference for deep pile carpet. It's a fucking unfinished basement, dickhead - what were you thinking when you read the house details? "Oh look honey, this house doesn't have a finished lower level, but we should go and see it anyway - you never know whether it might have grown one in the night." Did you think the fucking finished basement fairy might have visited and we'd all walk down there and exclaim in unmitigated delight "Wow, look at that elegant drywall and extra bathroom - how did that happen?"

At the end of the day the worst part about selling a house isn't the tidying, the realtors, the scheduling of appointments, the price reductions or the lack of control. It's dealing with members of the public in all their fucking stupid mindless ignorance. It's listening to their witless "feedback" about the lack of something we told them wasn't fucking well there before they decided to come and waste our fucking time with a visit. In any civilized society I should now be entitled under common law to go and kick the buyer firmly in the nutsack for sheer brainlessness. It's simply the right thing to do.


Copyright © 2010 Edward Bison

On Yer Bike

Want to know what pisses me off? I don't mean the whole list, you understand. Not even a subset of the list, really. No, just the most recent entry. It's cyclists. Fucking ladyboys in lycra weaving in and out of traffic like accidents are just something that happens to other people. There I was, driving home in Chicago traffic, trying not to run over the dayglo lycra-clad wanker to the right of me. At the stop sign I pulled forward, behind the car at the line, and two more gayboy cyclists cut in front of me and shot through the junction.

What is it with cyclists that makes them think they're so much more important than anyone else on the road. They exude that smug "I'm a more righteous road user than you" attitude, which would be bad enough by itself, but when you roll in that hideous uniform, shrink-wrapping their junk in brightly colored shorts, the urge to drive over one is almost irresistible. There was a bloke in the UK recently who chased and ran over a cyclist who'd knocked into his car, killing him. He got life. Life? Fuck me, more like justifiable homicide.

Leaving aside the stupid clothes for a moment, don't you just hate that "Now I'm traffic, now I'm not" bullshit that cyclists pull? When they're riding along the road you have to treat them like another road-user, swerving to avoid them as they wander all over the place, because heaven forbid that you actually hit one. Shame on you, not yielding to this uber-important and fragile fellow traveler. But as soon as there's any kind of impediment - stop sign, traffic light, you name it - they suddenly cease to be a road-user. "Those silly rules don't apply to me. I'm going to ride on the pavement, run the red light, cut in front of the car and fail to stop at the stop sign." Then, once they're past the obstruction it's right back to blocking your way and insisting that you yield to them. They're wankers, end of.

Now if I decide to have a little race with the car next to me, plod will have me in handcuffs before you can say "Rodney King", but wanky cyclists race along the road or sidewalk just as they please and nothing is ever done about them. Frankly, I'd lock the fuckers up just for the crime of shaving their legs, and it would serve them right if someone tattooed a pair of tits on their back and made them their prison wife as a result.

That cunt Lance Armstrong has a lot to answer for...