With little kids there is no difference between boys and girls. OK, I know about those differences, but look at the title of the post, here, as in law, it’s context, context, context. To make it clear for everybody, for small kids there is no difference between the sexes when sitting on the thrown is involved.
But when the boy gets a bit bigger he wants to be like papa and ventures into standing up while peeing. This is handed down from generation to generation and never questioned – men stand up while peeing!
In the initial training phases it creates a mess around the toilet, but even mama does not mind because junior is so cute as he wants to be like papa. Over time a percentage of male adults develop a skill to deposit their waste into the container they are aiming for, but take note of my formulation – not all succeed in that laudable skill.
The first time I encountered that this law of nature can be questioned was at a friends house. Very progressive guy, married when we were still in high school, driving his VW to school without a driver’s license (a very serious offense in Germany) and being altogether very cool.
He and his wife had their own apartment and so all of us who still lived with the parents certainly loved to hang out there. And he was so progressive that it might have been him and not his wife to clean the house, including the toilet. He must have gotten tired of cleaning after all those buddies of his because there was suddenly the sign in the bathroom:
I don’t want to clean and have a fit,
therefore please, all men do sit!
The German version was similarly rough in terms of metric, obviously using different words. But imagine the impact. I don’t remember if it actually had the impact on me abandoning my training and actually sitting down – I tend to think that I did not – but I have not forgotten in so many years.
I don’t know why, but over the years I had turned into a sitter-downer and when our son joined us, we brought him up as a sitter-downer as well – there was no dad role model to show him otherwise. But he certainly tried all this when the peer pressure in school kicked in.
And then there were his buddies visiting – all stander-uppers. How do we handle this? As we asked politely, the universe gave us an answer in form of a low resolution jpeg image that attempted to educate in a funny way. The resolution was so low that it was not usable to be printed and used as a sign in the bathroom. It took me considerable time to get my act together and design a new document with appropriate resolution and I hereby offer the world this work. I am deeply indebted to the person who had the idea and made the first graphic – unfortunately I don’t know his identity, I would love to give him – or her – credit.
Here is a low-res preview version, but you can click the image to get a high resolution pdf version of the graphic to laminate (!) and hang in your bathroom.
If you don’t know who Douglas Adams is you will probably not appreciate the following quotes by him. But if you do know him and love his ‘Hitchhikers to the Galaxy’ books and other writings, I think you will enjoy them…
