CHEKIT: The Crappiest Invention of All Time

Nick Schulz over at Slate has some issues with that creepy bathoom convenience, the auto-flush toilet:

To understand why hands-free toilet technology stinks, you must first understand three things that any well-designed loo should permit you to do.

1) Clean the pool. You must be able to flush the toilet easily before sitting down, in case any detritus remains from a previous, inconsiderate visitor.

2) Clean the pool, again. You must be able to flush more than once after you are done. Some of us are more prolific than others, and courteous patrons will want to ensure that Point 1 is unnecessary for whomever follows.

3) Issue a courtesy flush. If you plan to settle down with the sports page, you should flush immediately after dropping the kids at the pool. There's no need to let the kids linger any longer than absolutely necessary. This is for the benefit of other visitors.

Remarkably, the automatic-flush toilet makes all three of these tasks more difficult. Consider the following scenario: You enter a nearly full house, and only one stall is free. This is probably because those who got to the restroom first saw the remains of someone else's visit and moved on to one of the cleaner stalls. (See Point 1 above.) What are you to do? The only way to clean the pool is to sit down and let the latrine laser register your presence. Then you must get up and hope you sat on top of the foul commode long enough to "tell" the laser to issue a flush command. Meanwhile, the other patrons are probably aware that you are going through this humiliating exercise, as they saw the stall's condition before you arrived.

I, too, have experienced the dreaded "ghost flush" in which an auto-flush toilet initiates the flushing process while you're still in situ, spraying toilet water up onto your bum. If this were a bidet, that would be one thing, but it's most likely an airport toilet, where God-knows-what - including what you've just contributed - is being splashed up onto you.