It sometimes takes the smallest of things to spark my interest. The combination of the Artemis II toilet situation1 and this Mastodon post about returning home by @sundogplanets@mastodon.social did that. Big time.
In 1992 mum and I went on our first foreign holiday, to the west coast of the USA. I had enough time to research what differences we were likely to find, but my biggest fail was not anticipating mixer taps and toilet flushes.
A tap is a faucet in the ‘States. But that’s not it.
San Diego and Phoenix had cards by the handbasins asking patrons to save water directly, and save water by cutting down towel change requests. Makes a lot of sense there due to the region’s climate.
In the United Kingdom taps were, in my experience at least, two at a time, a hot and a cold. No mixers. Toilet flushes were either a pivoting handle on the front of the cistern or a chain pull when the cistern was suspended just below ceiling level.
And, right through until 2007, that’s just how it was. Pretty much.
And then my wife, first daughter and I moved house.
The previous owners – we called them ‘The Bastards’ for various reasons throughout the period of negotiation, the legal stuff, and for the issues we found after moving in – had installed ‘luxury’ features such as single push button low-capacity-cistern flushes, mixer taps in the en-suite (did we become posh buying the place?) and bathroom (the place with a bath).
Oooo… nice.
The utility room (yeah, we’re posh) and downstairs toilet (we have 3 toilets!) had a hot and cold tap and a handle flush. Fine, we’re not in those for long, and it was familiar.
But time passed and upgrades happened. So now we have push button flushes through and mixer taps everywhere apart from the utility room.
It’s not fashion. We save money with each flush – the designs have been updated to use less water. I get it. But…
Work installed new toilets, stand-up urinals and handbasins within the last year. The toilets have a dual-button flush. The taps have proximity detectors, the urinals work off a timer. (I don’t go in the Ladies). Every time I use the flushes I must think – which button?
I need an acronym thingy, because ‘small for yellow and big for brown’ doesn’t somehow work.
- Great head and tag lines! ↩