Someone out there is really thinking. I see bunches of great ideas in the mall, in hotels, in restaurants. But why, oh why, don’t they put some of these inventions in our homes?
Take toilet paper dispensers, for instance. They give us one lousy little thing that (1) is prone to falling off the wall, (2) won’t accommodate a roll larger than several inches wide, and (3) constantly needs refilling.
But go to the movies and you’ll see a big kahuna thing that holds miles of toilet paper and you couldn’t get it off the wall even if a professional wrestler jumped up and down on it. I want one for my bathroom. I would love going a month without replacing a single roll. (I say “I” because I am the only one in my household who knows how to replace toilet paper. It’s a mysterious thing.)
Or at least give me a two-roller. Some restrooms give you a spare roll so that when one runs out, you just move to the next one. If you didn’t want the big kahuna because it didn’t match your wallpaper or something, you could still go with the side-by-side variety that would match everything else in your bathroom. Still, you’d only have to replace it half as often.
I think there’s a market out there for designer kahunas, though. Just think of the possibilities. If they offered a variety of colors, you know, like Mac computers, or gold-tone, brass, or even gold-plated for the millionaires, all the moms in the world would go crazy. We’d be a happy lot.
And how about those automatic hand-washers?! I love them! My water bill would go down to almost nothing, because of all the times the faucet is left running when someone is brushing his or her teeth.
And how many times has a young mom had a baby on one hip, a bottle in the other, and no hand to turn on the silly faucet to wash the dust bunnies off the nipple? (This would not include first-time moms, of course. First time moms would have to boil the nipple before reinserting it into the baby’s mouth.) You’ll see all sorts of contortions, including the mom trying to turn on the faucet with her chin, teeth, or feet.
But my favorite new invention is the automatic toilet flusher. I don’t know how it knows I’m getting up and not sitting down, but that’s not my job to figure it out. I just know it works, and I want one of those, too.
It’s not that flushing the john is such a difficult thing, and I know it would make my kids just that much lazier. But I still love it. If they could install some sort of warning bell that sounded when little boys go outside the required boundary, it would be even better.
There are a couple of problems I foresee with having one of these in a home, though. One is the number of foreign objects that get dropped into the toilet in one’s lifetime.
“Mom, I dropped my silver dollar in the toilet!!” screams a little one.
No problem with a regular toilet. Mom dons her rubber gloves and fishes out the prized coin.
Not so with the auto-flush. You drop … then whoosh! Gone in a flash, I mean flush.
The other is sibling rivalry. Picture this: the mean older brother holding the little brother’s head underwater and flushing. Every time the younger one come up for air, it flushes again.
Someday, I bet we see all this new technology in our homes. When we do, just remember it was me who told you about it. Meanwhile, I’m working on plans for mass-producing pretty toilet paper kahunas.
