2008-02-21: The Awful German Toilet

Nod to Mark Twain for the title. 

I have traveled to many countries (upwards of 30 by now), and have used many different models of toilet*, yet I have never, ever seen toilets like these outside of Germany. To be brief and blunt — well, there’s this sort of viewing platform: a large, almost flat area in the bowl. It is almost impossible to Evacuate one’s Bowel without the opportunity to critically examine the product.

Despite the ease with which this design permits collecting a stool sample for one’s gastroenterologist, I found (and still find) this quite repellent. But being of a somewhat imaginative bent, I thought that perhaps it would make sense to incorporate some 21st-century features into this ubiquitous model — something I would be tempted to call the ViewMeister 2000, for example.

The new model would incorporate all the (waterproof) hardware necessary to facilitate a biometric readout of salient stool conditions (weight, density, laser-based “topographical” measurements). The inside toilet lid could have color charts and descriptions of “healthy” and “unhealthy” stools. Given how much my German colleagues (and my landlady and her family) seem to love all that is high-tech, this idea cannot help but come out okay in the end.

I did ask a German colleague about the rationale behind the design. Apparently the possibility of “splashback” is intolerable to the German mind, much more so than any problems with odor and flat-out bizarreness. (In fairness, the toilets at work are “normal.”)

*I have not always been successful with certain foreign toilets. Years ago, I had to ask someone how to flush a toilet in France: it just was not obvious at all. I’d looked for a pull-chain, a pull-up knob, a push-down button, a US-style handle, a button on the floor, a built-into-the-tank-top push-down flap — to no avail. There was this little hard-to-see rod on the side — very embarrassing. 

PS: I have never figured out bidets. And my favorite foreign toilets are the ones in Turkey, which incorporate a “normal” toilet design with the “best of the bidet,” as it were.

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