A Letter To The Makers Of The Automatic Toilet

Dear Demon-Seeds of Satan,

You guys are really proud of yourselves, aren't you? I imagine you sitting in your offices, basking in your own magnificence. "We've invented the automatic toilet! It flushes when triggered by a sensor!! We are saving humanity!!!" Little did you realize that you have created a monster. A stinky one.

You see, you never counted on the fact that the sensors would be useless in mid-dump. Without a human-activated trigger, the idea of a "courtesy flush" would go down the terlet! (Pun intended!) This is exactly what happened in The Matrix. The machines took over, and they destroyed humanity as we know it.

And you're letting it happen!

Here's a completely hypothetical situation that may or may not have happened to a mildly successful blogger, um, "friend" of mine today. We'll call him, Ttayw.

While Christmas shopping at the local mall today, I felt an urgent intestinal emergency suddenly arise. Speed-walking to the men's room, I barely made it before a whirling dervish of waste exploded from my colon. It is quite possible that parts of said colon escaped as well. Anyway, the bathroom was quite small, and I had to juggle keeping my "Larry Craig stance" to a minimum, while dealing with a tsunami of smell in the stall.

Immediately after the intestinal explosion, I realized that I was sitting upon one of your automatic toilets. Immediately after that, I was struck with the notion that a courtesy flush was necessary to protect myself and humanity as a whole. If word (or smell) of this got out, I would be banned from the mall forever. Something had to be done.

Unfortunately, flushing was not an option, because the automatic toilet doesn't flush until you stand up, open the stall door, and whistle "In A Gadda Da Vida" in b-minor. What happened next was a comedy of errors. I stood up and waved at the sensor. Nothing. I moved to the side of the stall, in an effort to "trick" the sensor into thinking I was gone. Bupkis. I finally listened for others, and when convinced I was alone, I opened and closed the door about a dozen times - with my pants still down, by the way - until the despicable machine did its duty. Heh, heh, "duty."

Tragic tales such as this are all too common in the automatic toilet world. Your Frankenstein's monster is wreaking havoc across the land, and you don't seem to care. We need a loophole, a kill switch to override the sensor when it is a matter of life and death (and smell). So, get off your asses and work on a solution already.

I don't want The Matrix to get me.

Sincerely, Wyatt Earp