In the year 2000, our bathrooms became modernized. Tissues are of better quality – if someone doesn’t steal it – and the bathroom lights are usually not on a timer anymore. Most modern
facilities now have au
tomatic flushers (even though at times they might scare you off the seat like a high power Hoover vacuum about to suck you down the drain without warning when it decides you should be done – not sure which is worse.)
Where is the flushing device? Is it: the side level, wall mounted, vertical level, cord hanging from the ceiling, electric eye or the rubber floor pedal. I have seem them all. Is it the small ball to the side of the tank, the handle on the unit or the red spot on the water tank? Sometimes I could not find it at all. Might be the reason in the past one would often find public toilets at times un-flushed.
Recently seeing an old cord flusher reminded me of years ago, as a college student one morning when getting ready for my shower in a hotel room. I pulled a long cord which was often found to the left of the toilet. Not paying attention to the absence of the sound of water swirling down the drain, I looked up to a number of happy faces of smiling men on the deck playing cards outside my window, glancing at my stark naked 20 year old body. I had pulled the curtain shade up thinking it was the mission-impossible damn flusher!
Thank God that was then. Today their smiles would be replaced with ugly frowns, frightened by the sight of my body 50 years later!
