March 7, 2022: Etiquette under Pressure -

Way back when people first starting to have PCs – PERSONAL computers!! PERSONAL!!! – on their very own desks at work (an exciting time, sympathy to those of you born too late to experience it), I read a study about how those people talked about their new devices. Actually, it was about how and WHERE they talked about them.

I can’t find this study (search strategy fail), and don’t know if it was ever replicated, but I remember it because I purely loved the findings, which struck me as TRUE. Bottom line, if people were asked whether or not they liked their PCs (and both PCs and their software were often pretty buggy at this point), the answers varied depending on whether users were within “earshot” of the PC in question. If they were surveyed at their desk, or nearby, where the PC could “hear” them, users were generally complimentary. It would be rude to insult a PC to its face. And it might annoy the PC!

On the other hand, if users were surveyed in the lunchroom or the parking lot, they would moan about the bugs and glitches and long loading times, and so forth.

I have seen friends apologize to their cars, after an outburst of frustration. I totally get it. And I’m thinking about the study because we have a newish toilet.  And only one bathroom in the house, not far from where I’m sitting! And let me tell you, that is ONE HANDSOME toilet! Far nicer looking than the one it replaced! Sleek, yet unpretentious.

(Shuts two doors.) But so finicky! We have had the plumber out twice. Today I learned that it is a low-flow toilet, which I think I should have known when we bought it. Nice guy, like everyone at Three Mountains Plumbing, a company with the stated goal of making plumbing calls “delightful.” After he finished his low-flow-toilet-seminar with us, I said, “Well, I suppose if worse comes to worst, we can just get rid of it and buy a high-flow one, right?”

He looked uncomfortable, and said No, actually, that wasn’t possible, they aren’t made any more, but we had bought a 2018 model, and they’d gotten a LITTLE bit better in the last four years, so maybe we could get an even NEWER one. And then he sortof chuckled and said that there IS a black market for high-flow toilets. He looked guilty when he said this, and, as advertised, I suddenly found the whole experience delightful.

I don’t plan to make this nice young guy do anything shady. But it all felt, just for a moment, so hilariously clandestine.

I had a chat with a lovely young woman last night, part of a volunteer gig, and she said that she feels things deeply, and that Ukraine is heavy on her heart. I felt both empathy and a strange impatience – if Ukraine isn’t heavy on somebody’s heart right now, why not? 

And part of me knows that writing about toilet repair is trivial at times like these. Or at any time. Maybe it's unfeeling, and I I shouldn’t do it. And another part of me thinks: we're all under pressure, and a toilet repair story is just a break, a moment off, is all. We can use a break.