Stand Up and Pee Counted, Guys

I read an interesting article in the doctor's waiting room last week. It wasn't his 'open to the public' waiting room, but one of his three 'in waiting' rooms where we are shunted to make it look like he is dutifully forging through his patients. That would be the flock of patients he has booked in for exactly the same time in the early a.m. After all, afternoons are for golf, aren't they?

The article was in The Readers Digest of January 2005. The date of the magazine impressed me as being the youngest one I'd ever seen in his pile of dog-eared, cover-less, infected reading material. I considered reading it but I had no rubber gloves with me, but then after an hour of my own company I just had to read something, so I slid the magazine over with my elbow and opened it using one of the Doc's tongue depressors.

My intention was to flick through the funnies, but the article about a talking toilet grabbed my attention. Apparently a German man, (man, please note as in 'man in fear of his life.') has invented a gadget which fits under toilet seats. When a man lifts the seat up to urinate, the gadget speaks. 'Stand-peeing is not allowed here.....you'd best sit down,' it scolds.

Hold your water, guys. If the toilet seat has already reached your area, don't fret. This is just another skirmish in the 'seat up /seat down' war of the sexes. For decades women have been brain washing us to lift the seat before we pee. Generations of men don't realize that there was a time when it wasn't like this; a time when men didn't have a guilt complex or looked for security cameras when they unzipped. If we aren't careful, there will come a time when men will sit down to pee and think it is a natural act. This is what women want.

Men believe that women's insistence on SU/SD is because we dribble and they always have to clean up after us; the sub text being that women don't dribble. Only men dribble. This is a lot of pi...er....urine. Believe me; the toilet bowl seats in women's washrooms are just as damp as in men's toilets -- um -- so I'm told. [This next statement may offend males of a sensitive disposition, especially those men who have recently met the Goddess or Angel of their dreams, but have not yet shared a washroom with them. It is recommended that you skip to the following paragraph]. Women dribble when they pee! While I'm in the same delicate area, they also pass wind - up and down.

Another reason that ladies give for the SU/SD routine is that they are scared they get their butts wet as they reverse onto the toilet bowl. Without getting into a 'women can't reverse' discussion, why don't they check before they sit down, like men do? Come to think of it, why do they back-up to have a pee? It would be just as simple to drive forward. Mmm, why do toilet bowls have to be backed up to a wall? They could be moved near the center of the washroom. The water cistern could be designed to fit along each side of the bowl like arm rests. It could be called The Drive-Thru Loo.

Talking of toilet design guys, have a seat on the bowl and cogitate. How does the bowl strike you? Is it lower than you remember? Is it squatter than it was in your youth? You hadn't noticed, had you? Female interior designers have been quietly lowering the height and flattening toilet bowls. Again, women tell us that the subtle, sleeker design is so that toilets, and the thought of the vulgar reason for them, can blend in with their surroundings - disappear, if you will. And disappear is exactly what they do from the height of a peeing man. Trying to urinate into a designer toilet bowl is very hit or miss, mostly miss. Peeing into the eighteenth hole in the golf course after a visit to the nineteenth hole is a lot easier.

You may have noticed the thread joining all these 'reasons.' Women are forcing us to sit down and pee. Forget the so called reasons of 'having to clean up after us' or 'not getting their butts wet' or 'hiding the vulgar toilet bowl.' Women have been consumed by a jealous rage against men ever since Eve strolled around to the other side of the apple tree into an out- of- season snow storm and found Adam peeing his name in the snow. Not to be outdone, Eve attempted the same feat. When she found that she could only write circles and figure eights in the snow, she was so furious that she shoved an apple down Adam's throat and declared war.

Eve and her descendants were winning the war until they sank too low. Men started re-forming their battalions when the toilet bowls became so low that they couldn't stretch their legs out as they tried to sit down, and were having to support themselves by holding on to the damp seat. Weapons training began when older, arthritic men couldn't sit down on the newer toilets; if they did get down, they could not get up without help. As one octogenarian said as he stood to attention and urinated in the general direction of downward. "Vive la Difference."

The final insult which stiffened men's resolve to fight back was about the differences between the sexes. The differences that tend to dangle. And when sitting on a newer, sleeker toilet bowl, guess what they dangle in?