WHAT THIS WORLD IS COMING TO

What is it with these energy efficient products on the market today, and the fact that TLW (The Little Woman) buys them and they don’t bother her, but boy, they sure bother me!

Take for instance, just one room in my house, the downstairs toilet. Now this is a very important room to me, on a daily basis. It is a pit stop, or was a decent reading room, and when I need water, a convenient place to get some when I’m too far away from the kitchen.

So what has TLW got to do with all this, and the wonderful confines of the downstairs toilet? Glad you asked.

A few years ago, when we redid the downstairs, (18 exactly, but whose counting?) we replaced everything including the toilet bowl, the ceramic throne. Some misguided Jessie James sold TLW on the idea of an energy efficient flush. Yes, save a lot of water with this baby. You press the handle and round and round it goes, not down with a gurgling gulp, but watch it spin. Everything is still floating and you are faced with dealing with it again! So you hold the key down longer the second time until it finally disappears. You have now probably tripled the amount of water you used to begin with, and you haven’t even washed your hands yet!

OK, so we made a mistake with this thing. Then one day, the light bulb goes, that sits over the sink in the same toilet. TLW replaces the bulb. I go in and turn on the light, no light! Then a slow glimmer of light starts out like a sunrise and I can see faintly, wondering if I have a cataract problem, am drunk or just losing it to old age. As the bulb starts to heat up, the light becomes stronger, until after some time, you can now see your nose. What is the sense of having that especially in the toilet, where a sports section in the newspaper doesn’t take as long to read as the bulb does to give me light?

While I’m in the toilet, let us talk for a moment about the toilet paper. I love to go out to hotels, motels and public places to use the toilet. In fact, if I could hold it long enough to get to one of these facilities instead of using the one at home: I get two-ply! Yes, that wonderful old-fashioned two plied toilet paper that once graced my toilet, which we no longer use. So I guess the two-ply is more expensive than the one-ply, but like that one sports newscaster used to say: “Let’s go to the tape” let’s go to the one-ply and we use twice as much in terms of inches. What have we gained? Don’t ask.

So at the end of the day we have a spinning one-ply in the dark.