who the fuck leaves the door to the toilet open?

It's always my cats that keep opening the bathroom door in my house.

xpost

Yes! Toilet doors NEED locks. Definitely.

The other day I noticed on Sex & The City that one of those girls on that show left the bathroom door open so you could see her toilet. Eh.

I've made this argument to four different women (that I can think of) -- like down the point of making little charts and doing math -- and three of them went on insisting that I was wrong, and that Man Puts Seat Down is the only efficient way of organizing things. It's not that I mind putting seats down, I was just offended by their gesturing away Proper Science and insisting there was no more egalitarian method.

Man pees, lowers seat when done. Next user is a man, who then has to raise seat, pee, then lower seat = 1 wasted raising and 2 wasted lowerings of seat.

Most efficient is to leave it how it stands when you're done, let the next person adjust if necessary.

I sometimes lower the seat and lid to make everyone suffer.

POOPIN UR TUB

The reason I put the seat down has less to do with being nice to the next person (conceivably she should put it up for me to pee then) than the fact that my 17 year old cat, with beginning signs of renal failure, is always thirsty and uses it as a step to get up to the counter and lick water from the faucet.

My graphing this for people wasn't even meant to suggest that people should adopt the leave-it-as-it-stands rule -- I just wanted these women to admit that the issue wasn't efficiency. It was that women who don't live with men just don't have the "register position of toilet seat" habit; they live in a world where that situation just doesn't typically arise, and so it seems like some kind of big exercise to adjust to it. Whereas men are used to manipulating the seat up and down just for themselves, and so the woman logic runs something like, you know, "I don't know the intracicies of whatever the hell they're doing with moving toilet seats around, but it has nothing to do with me."

yea, esp if you have EXPOSED TOOTHBRUSH HEAD

We have no lock on the bathroom door either.

Also, I am beginning to think I am horrible for rarely closing toilet lid. Do I get special dispensation for being microbiologist by training?

As for toilets, is it uncommon to have the WC in its own room in other countries? Most ppl here have a toilet room and a bathroom, unless you're in a tiny flat or have 2 loos or something. "spray" problem avoided. Well, that and we dont have loos 4/5 full of water like you strange americans ;) ;)

i thought the question being asked was about people leaving the door open WHEN THEY ARE MID-SHIT, and i thought "you mean my dad isn't the only one?". he doesn't leave it wide open, but just a bit ajar. i dunno maybe he's claustrophobic. i'd ask him, but i try to pretend it doesn't happen.

Well, the most egalitarian method is if the men just sit down to piss, therefore negating the need for any seat movements whatsoever!

Not that anybody is going to impinge on my right to stand up to piss, mind.

lid down, cover on, all times - not for "efficiency" but more for, like, feng shui but also so in the end-times flood all the snakes, rats, alligators, penguins, monsters don't get in.

1) Men are the ones who dribble urine on the rim of the toilet. This urine then transfers to the underside of the seat. Girls should not have to risk contamination - seeing as the men are the dribblers they should be the lifters/putter-downerers too.

2) Women back up to the toilet and so if the seat is up they may not notice and then sitting on cold porcelain and falling in too deep can happen.

Andrew OTM about it just being easier for all if guys sat down to wee.

My aim, mademoiselle is true and I never denude my (prudish) pudenda without looking first and if you've cleaned as much unavoidable human excreta from the porcelain of commodes as I have, now that I'm in my dotage, you'd think twice about ascribing it all to one sole sex.

I just find this whole scenario so laughable. Do women not look at a toilet before approaching it? It's not like you're some big truck that has to do a 3-point-turn and then back in towards it. Frankly I would never use a toilet without actually looking at it first, even if it's in my own house.

My father once told us he went to pee in the middle of the night and found a large rat in the bowl (he assumed it crawled through the sewer rather than entered the bowl from the bathroom).

If we assume one man and one woman cohabitating, the leave-it-as-it-stands rule would still mean that the seat would wind up mostly down (maybe 2/3 of the time), so the woman would still get a slightly better deal on seat-moving effort. (The small task of actually looking to see which position the seat is in before you, like, do anything with it would be split equally between both parties, obviously.)

See we work with THREE women and there's only one man. He rarely uses the same toilet as we do, so, if he does, then there's that rare chance the seat is up. When it is, I usually notice it too late. Oops, cold porcelain.

i am cracking up imagining you guys carefully inspecting the toilet and its surrounds everytime you go for your constitutional...

Carefully inspecting? A half-second glance is all that's required to determine the position of the lid. I give public toilets a few more seconds to assess cleanliness, etc.

I can't get my head round the logistics of this... how exactly does this urine get to the underside? The only transfer I can work out is to the pads and not the seat itself. But then how this gets off the pads to anywhere else to potentially cause "contamination" baffles me.

But I would rather lazy men who leave the seat up than lazy men who use the toilet without lifting it in the first place, as sadly most of them seem to have an optimistic idea of their own ability to aim and even the slightly reduced target area represented by a seat in the way often defeats them.

This suggests that either:
a) you are entirely comfortable with people walking in on you having a shit as long as they are people you know, or
b) you put a sign on the door saying "shit in progress - do not enter" every time you use the toilet

When I was 20, I was staying with a friend in Japan. The mother, who was in her eighties, would put her face against the frosted glass to check if I was in the toilet. She then muttered a few words and left. No wonder I was constipated.

so in the end-times flood all the snakes, rats, alligators, penguins, monsters don't get in.

this is the best argument i've ever heard for leaving the lid down!

in our house the bathroom (1x bathroom with bath, shower, sink, toilet in it) door stays open all the time, wedged with a little door wedgey stick, unless someone's in there. so does the window. light comes in and we have no stinky problems (possibly this is bc we are both gurls and hence our doings smell of violets and honeysuckle). there's a bolt on the inside of the door but i barely use it - i don't think my flatmate does much either, unless there's a guest in the house who might not know door closed = someone in there. i suspect we'll have to take the bolt off before long as it looks like her little boy's going to figure out how to walk soon and it would be better if it wasn't possible for him to lock himself in the bathroom.

B-but it stops the contents of the toilet, atomised by the flush into a kind of airborne suspension of excreta, from floating around in microscopic particles!!

Which reminds me of some true mentalism, entirely off-topic, but still: http://www.susbloodlabs.com/biganatomy.html

Also, leave it how you used it. It takes no effort whatsoever to flip the seat up or to put it down.

xpost

Perhaps the backwards-onto-the-seat movement is from some 16th century historical rule about it being "improper for women to look at a commode" or something

OK I can kind of theoretically see why this may be an infectious disease issue in a public bathroom (where there are often no lids anyway!), but how exactly is your atomised airborne suspension of YOUR OWN EXCRETA in your own bathroom going to hurt you?

Does the flesh on women's legs magically wrap underneath the toilet seat onto the rim? If so, why is the seat there in the first place???

atomised by the flush into a kind of airborne suspension of excreta

Okay WTF kind of magical space-aged toilet do you have???? Does it have a laser grid instead of water?

Thanks, Dan, you have no idea of the size of the woman I'm having to picture to imagine this happening.

It is true that these days I am expected to consume loads of crap.

Against my hallowed flesh, no trace
of carbon-based molecular taint,
no stranger's strange DNA tingling
on my nether cheeks, no creatures
creeping into my caverns,
but rather the powder-dry newness of plastic,
slinking and sheeting the world
like the condom of God,
sliding between the clean and unclean
like veils between the bashful bride and her
rough-mannered bridegroom.
My lace-encased purity is a magnet to the soil,
the muck, the many-legged things.
The legions leap to sully me,
vaulting off the seat,
the rim, the pool within.
get behind me, polluters! Defilers!
Befoulers of water-closets,
breeders of vermin,
and rogue inseminators.
Keep your fetid fluids to yourselves,
lest you desiccate from this wanton
broadcasting of invisible spew.
I shall not be the cause
of your self-mummification.
InterHygiene Automated Toilet Seat Protection System
Is for your protection, too.

-- Beth Parker (marthasminion...), June 10th, 2006 9:12 AM. (Beth Parker) (link)

http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a990416.html

Ha, the thing that bugs me about having the lid down is that it's like we're trying to pretend it's not a toilet, or something, like every time you go into the bathroom you can be all "oh look at this very interesting chair ... why, amazing, hidden inside the chair is some sort of feces-disposal system! What will those marvelous scientists think of next."

Toilette, water-closet, bathroom, restroom, loo, they're all euphemisms aren't they?

Toilette originally meant a small towel or piece of cloth and through its association with hygiene became associated with grooming and eventually doing one's hair. Later, it became associated with something private and by extension and extreme euphemism it became the word for the room with the shitter in it at that bourgeois part of the 19th century when they started to exist indoors at all.

(ie, TURN BACK YOU PONCEY FULE)

http://atilf.atilf.fr/dendien/scripts/tlfiv4/showps.exe?p=combi.htm;java=no;

Look up 'toilette'.

I don't disagree that fecal germs go everywhere, but if they are your own fecal germs, what harm could they possibly cause? I mean you're not going to get sick from inhaling/touching/ingesting trace amounts of your own feces! Someone else's feces, perhaps, but not your own!

this just makes me want to stop reading.

If you have pathogenic organisms coming out of you then they were already in you in the first place! A few more going in is not going to make a difference!

Example, you ate some punk spinach and get yrself some E. coli 0157:H7. You shit. A lot. And some of that shit atomizes when you flush without closing lid. You breath some in and it goes down your gullet into your gut, where it joins. . . more E. coli 0157:H7!

Do you realize how many varieties of animal shit you are consuming every day? Running your produce under cold water for a couple seconds isn't going to cut it ever.

Every time you run the faucet in your kitchen sink you are atomizing all sorts of nastiness into the room where you keep your food.

My solution? Eat out of cans and prepackaged microwavable containers and don't wash up after you flush. I AM LESS CONTAMINATED THAN YOU.

THE SHITCAN. THE PEE DISPENSER. THE POOPOO BOX.

I don't know, Dan, you tell me!

You need to talk to your landlord about the plumbing.

(xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxpost to original question)

Not that any of that is an argument not to keep your shit hygenic, if you have the time and inclination, but it doesn't seem like anything to get unduly worried about, considering we live in some of the most hygenic conditions human beings have ever had the opportunity to occupy. (The only arguments against ultra-hygeine would involve pampering your immune system too much -- and I'm not so sure of the science on that one -- and of course the way you should probably avoid slathering anti-bacterial products all over the universe, what with the whole breeding-more-resistant-strains thing.)

eat soap?

Speculation that asthma is caused by a pampered immune system

So go forth and expose thyself to antigens early and often, people.

Proven. By. Science.

Dangle your baby over the toilet as you flush, ensuring total aerosol-plume coverage!

ROFFLES at foamy shit. Please don't GIS.

proven by this thread: my english is really crap. i mean, fuck, being tired makes it even worse,but this thread proves yet again how linguistically challenged i am. :-(

I'm with the pro-germ camp. We need our germs. Are we constantly at deaths door because we use toilets? NO! But sanitising everything in sight with bleach and triclosan and antibiotics is what is making people more prone to allergies and illnesses. Look at what happens when you go eat somewher like India or SE Asia. A lot of people get a dicky tum, but the locals never do (illness from extreme poverty aside obv). Western guts arent as strong as they should be is why.

IIRC it's the rubbing motion of your hands when washing them that actually kills the bacteria.

I live in an old house with only one bathroom and a WC with a swing door that automatically closes and has a lock; there is also a high "vented" window to the outside. So no problems with smell or matter spreading about to infect toothbrushes etc. Problem solved. Except for the fact you might BREATHE in the matter after flushing, but you do need some exposure. (Right?)

I know this is English but for some reason I think it means something different from what I'm assuming it means.

Holiday ethics question: what do you do when a loved one stinks the entire hallway up with poo? Will they take it personally if you spray the place with powdery crap? It's like admitting that you smelled their nasty poo!

I do not love people who poo.

maybe i'm just an anal freak

Leave an air freshener out in the bathroom. If they're considerate they'll spray it on their own.

An aerosol bottle of dilute hydroxypropyl beta-cyclodextrin actually works pretty well to chelate malodiferous compounds. Febreze on the tank is as important as paper on the roll in my WC.

Maybe you're right, I'm a clean freak. Me and my family keep those blue things in the toilet. Also air wick doesn't work in the bathroom.

so the house im sharing, its just me and the owner (yeah bad idea i shoulda known better). and i always leave the bathroom door closed although he wants it open cos it lets light in on the stairs. trust me you dont want my morning post-first-coffee-and-cigarette poo emanating throughout the house. so as i was leaving to go away for the weekend i came back today to find the door off its fucking hinges and hes pissed cos i closed the door again. i need to move dont i?

― Michael B, 25 January 2010 23:29 (10 months ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink
lol i was telling a girl i work with abt what an arsehole i was when i lived in the situ described above. lol i did way worse stuff than i said i did.

― plaxico (I know, right?), 25 January 2010 23:36 (10 months ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink
xp
noooo, you need to let that stank emanate through the house.

actually yeah, he is a jerk. quite aggressive for a passive aggressive person

― CaptainLorax, 25 January 2010 23:37 (10 months ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink
you could try leaving the door open

i symapthise with the dude though for slightly different reasons. if people close the bathroom door the cats can't get to their litterbox, with inevitable unpleasant results :(

― mintox plus oral (electricsound), 25 January 2010 23:41 (10 months ago) Bookmark

i walked into a one seater bathroom a few months ago in this dive bar, and dude just left the door unlocked, and was sitting spread-eagle on the toilet with a shit-eating grin like he intended for it to happen all along. slammed the door on him and hit the ground running.

on the flipside, don't you find it annoying when you're the one on the pot in a public place, and have clearly locked the door, and despite this obvious state of things, the person attempts to open the door not once, twice, but three times, as if they think the door is welded shut and not that someone is dropping actual mud monkeys on the other end?

when this happens I always have a paranoid fear, that the idiot in question will go to the owner/manager saying the door is stuck, and the owner will unlock the door for them, and both will walk in on me with my pants around my ankles.

Feller locked me in a cubicle once Followed me in, latched the door, introduced himself.

I've mentioned this in another thread but people who number-one with the door open are begging to be knocked over. Seriously. You can't see these people until you're on top of them. Shut the bloody door.

I was just thinking about this thread two minutes ago. Co-worker went into the only stall to pee, closing and locking the door behind him.

Like, how long are you gonna be in there? and you really care if someone sees your back?

No, see, that's exactly the travesty of humanity that makes me ia enough to post to this thread. If you've got 20 seconds to have a slash, you've got another two to lock the door. And it's not about your back being seen, it's about someone actually walking into the back of you.

With, you know, piss going everywhere.

anybody sit on the commode backwards? they call that the krisskross

As long as they don't jump jump.

dump dump

^ username explains why u dont leave the toilet door open

I don't know where else to put this so I'm putting it here

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5088/5279822360_42a002c220.jpg

Also, if your toilet is generating a noticeable mist, YOU HAVE A PROBLEM WITH YOUR TOILET.
― Young Fresh Danny D (Dan Perry), Thursday, September 21, 2006 12:43 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink