Saturday, August 30--Potty Mouth

With Jim out of town, I took the opportunity to sort and organize the owner’s manuals that I found stuffed in a drawer in the kitchen when we moved in. There are the typical manuals you’d expect to find in any home—stove, refrigerator, dishwasher, A/C units, water heater, etc. The one that caught me off guard was the tome for the operation of the TOILET. There is absolutely no reason any human being should need operating instructions for a toilet. However…once you see our toilets, you will understand the necessity for an instruction book of this size. Both our upstairs and downstairs toilets are high-tech, but the one upstairs is definitely the high-end model.

Jim calls it the Captain Kirk toilet, because it has at least as many buttons and knobs as the Starship Enterprise. It’s quite possible that we can actually fire phasers from this toilet, although we’ll never figure it out because all of the buttons are labeled in Kanji.

Even without the instructions, I can tell just by sitting on it that our toilet has a heated seat (in the States, a heated seat only happens when the person before you has been in there WAY too long--EWWW). But after studying the book, I determined that not only can we adjust the temperature of the seat, we can program it to come on and go off at set times during the day (why waste the electricity if you're at work all day?). Also just by sitting, I can activate the built-in fan—this is the desmell feature, according to the book. After more study (again, someone took pity on the Americans and added a few English words to the diagrams), it appears that our toilet has a built-in bidet, fanny-washer, and air-dryer. Using various buttons and knobs, you can adjust the direction, volume, and temperature of the water spray for the bidet and fanny-washer, as well as the temperature of the air-dryer. There is also a massage function to the fanny-washer and/or bidet. Excuse me, what exactly are we massaging here???

Now here is where the upstairs toilet takes a drastic leap ahead of the technology of the downstairs toilet. It comes with a REMOTE CONTROL. Why in heaven’s name do you need a remote control for a toilet? Where else are you going to possibly be when you need your fanny washed? It’s not like being too lazy to get up from the couch to change the TV channel. You are already sitting on top of the fanny-washer! The on button is right beside you!! Why the remote?!? What exactly is the range on this remote? I’d hate to be in there when Jim is in the mood to be a jokester. I think I will remove the batteries and hide the remote, just in case….