Friday, October 10, 2014

Saving Just a Wee Dram o'Water

Here's an idea to "save" water.  Pee in the shower.

Problem:  We do not in general either create or destroy water.  FRESH water, perhaps, POTABLE water certainly.  We convert water from drinkable into a temporarily icky form (to quote PJ O'Rourke).

But the idea that we should use social shaming to force people to pee in the shower for extremely dubious benefits is bizarre.  The only saving, in a wet nation like England, is the saving on chemicals for cleaning and electricity for pumping.  Residential water use is just not that siginficant a source of water "waste."

Of course, a shower DOES use a lot of water.  If these kids were serious, they would be suggesting that REAL conservations would be taking a bath in the toilet, before they pee in it.  And then you could flush away the soap, dirty water, and pee all at once.  If you really cared about the environment, kids, you would bathe in the toilet, rather than pee in the shower.

Lagniappe:  The alternative at my college, Davidson, was to pee in the sink (each room had one).  This wasn't so bad in the men's dorm, I suppose.  But at 8:30 on Sunday mornings there sometimes young lady visitors who had "visited" overnight, and they didn't want to walk down the hall in their evening wear to use the loo.  So they tried to pee in the sink.  Of course, given the structure of female urine delivery systems, this meant that they had to plop their petite little behinds up into the sink.  I do recall at least two loud crashing sounds when at different times a sink was torn off the wall by a young lady trying to answer a call of nature in a men's dorm.  Ah, the memories.

UPDATE:  Snopes needs to get out more.

UPDATE II:  Oh. My. God.  Look what I've been missing.  Technology is great, and capitalism is even better.  I mean, you can buy these things on Amazon.

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Do you have suggestions on where we could find more examples of this phenomenon?