I have had some pretty awful experiences recently with toilets and its gotten me thinking.  What is so god damn difficult about making a toilet?  Why have we advanced at such a ridiculous rate in the past few decades in terms of manufacturing, amazing strides in technology and yet, still I have toilet problems?

If you were to take a ride in the plutonium-powered DeLorean time machine back to the 1970’s (Back to the Future references, FTW!), you essentially would have seen the exact toilets we have now in the US.  Present day Shanghai however is a different story.  I’ve lived in three places on my own here.  The first two places, relatively luxurious three bedroom apartments both had subpar toilets.  I have decided to begin rating toilets on a new scale I developed that tells how often they plug up and this is the problem I have with toilets today.  They simply plug up way way way to much.  Most toilets in the US have a rate of about 10%.  That means 1 out of 10 times, the toilet is plugged and I need a plunger to fix the problem.  (Either that or I just never visit this bathroom again….  This strategy doesn’t work so well in the company office).  The first two places in Shanghai had a rate of 25%.  1 in 4 would require additional plunging!  Lately though, the rating has further slipped.  My current toilet has a 50% rating in this apartment I’m rating.  To make matters worse, it has no plunger so I’m forced to use one of those toilet cleaners as a plunger to prevent disaster.

Speaking of disaster, beware.  Do not eat a meal while you read this next depiction of events.  I fell on the wrong side of the 50% rating this morning.  Naturally, the water in the toilet rose to about half the bowl.  I waited for the backup supply of water to fill, opting to make it a 2nd attempt at flushing without using the modified plunger / toilet cleaner.  I then flushed again when the water had filled in the backup tank, and again, water rose higher in the toilet bowl.  In the past, when it gets this high, it occasionally would eventually go down, flush and my problems would be over.  This time however, I was not so lucky.  The water just kept rising and rising.  At the very same moment, I happened to be looking at something else in the bathroom and when I turned my head, a meniscus was forming inside the toilet bowl.  I leapt forward to grab the toilet cleaner and stuck it in the toilet as soon as I possibly could in order to save spillage from occurring.  The good part was that I averted disaster and it started to flush as the water drained down.  The bad news was that I was so quick to jam that toilet cleaner thing into the toilet, I went too and my hand, all the way up to my wrist, went in the water.  Ewwwwwwww.

So back to the question at hand, which is why are the toilets still so shitty and why are they even worse at places in Shanghai?  Is it really that difficult to make a toilet that doesn’t clog?  If I wrote backend code for Tapulous that only worked 90% of the time, Tapulous would be in a heap of trouble.  If anyone did anything that only worked 90% of the time, they would be in a heap of trouble.  Why do toilets get away with it?  I suggest instead of all these crazy engineers working to perfect the next technology in high-definition tv’s or the next chemical engineers discovering crazy cures for disease, can we assign a group of engineers to create a very inexpensive toilet that always works.  I never want to use a plunger again (or a toilet cleaner)!