toilets: general

I used to believe…

When I was a kid I overheard my Mom talking on the phone to her cousin. The cousin's husband apparently had to have hemorrhoid surgery, and I heard my Mom say it was caused by "staying on the toilet too long." The only thing I could figure out was that the poo made poison fumes that wafted up to his bottom and made a disease on it.

I used to believe…

my mum grew up on a farm with a long-drop (ie no plumbing) toilet. a guy would come each week to replace the bucket that held all the toilet waste. anyway, my mum always thought the guy just came with a huge wooden spoon to scoop out all the poo etc and never changed the bucket. she thus thought this was the most disgusting job of all.

I used to pretend that the bathroom was a time machine and as soon as I sat on the toilet I would be transported to another place in time.

I used to believe that 'to let' signs were advertising near by toilets!

I used to believe that the signs which said 'To let' were signs for toilets that had been mis-spelt!

I used to believe…

The huge signs displayed around cities saying 'To Let' were, I thought considerate people telling you that that there was a toilet very near by. I would look around the area for the toilet, just out of interest, but wondered why I couldn't find the toilet.

I used to believe that my dead gran was in my toilet, just beyond the u bend. This was because when she died I was told that she had gone where my goldfish had, and I'd seen them flushed down the loo. I would sometimes sit with my head down the pan telling my gran what was going on!

I remember the first time I used the urinals at infant school - when I went to wash my hands and turned the tap on, the urinal "showers" came on at the very same moment. I spent several break-times trying to convince other kids that they could wash in the urinal by turning the tap on. Needless to say, it never did work a second time.

I used to believe that a little boy lived under my house and ate all the poop 'cuz he had nothing else to eat.

I used to believe…

When I was at kindergarten we used to get a day a year where they hired clowns to entertain the kids. One night I had a bad dream, in which one of said clowns drowned in a toilet. On recounting this to my kindergarten teacher, she told me that there was a monster in every toilet that only eats clowns. I believed every word of it and to this day I associate clowns with lavatorial drowning. The woman scarred me for life!

I used to think the suction of an aeroplane toilet was large enough to suck your kidneys and spleen out.

I used to think that when i flushed the toilet, the waste water would eventually come back to the fawcett that fed our bath tub. Therefore, every time I had a bath I checked first before getting in the tub to make sure there weren't any turds floating around.

I used to believe…

When I was little I thought that when you flush the toilet it would come out of other bathroom pipes if they were turned on. I would never start to brush my teeth until after the toilet stopped making noise. To this day I can't brush my teeth or take a drink of water from the bathroom sink if I have just flushed the toilet.

I used to believe…

My primary school had normal sized loos for the infants and kids sized ones in the juniors. I thought that they had bigger loos in the infants as infants tend to chuck up more.

I had always seen the "Rest Room" sign on a door in Burger King, and I imagined that some sort of sleepy paradise was behind it: wonderful beds everywhere, lots of pillows, folks catching a nap during a hard day . . .

I thought that toilet seats were covers to stop men splashing etc and to keep the seat clean and that you sat on the cold bit. I continued to use toilets in this way until my late teens disgusted at the way other people failed to use the cover properly.