revenge of the robo toilet
When I started writing on substack more than a year-and-a-half ago, I said I’d be writing about the avant-garde in music, art, and engineering. Not surprisingly, the music part has dominated my topics so far. I did start out with a tech related story on my robo vac, and I recently had another robo experience I wanted to share. But fear not my recent subscribers, I have plenty of music in the pipeline to write about, including more interviews.
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On a recent vacation with my wife, we rented a luxury studio apartment at our destination. I wasn’t too involved in the planning, but the place looked ultra-modern in the pictures my wife showed me. It seemed perfect for our week long stay, so off we went.
As soon as we arrived at the building there was a problem … a tech problem of course. My wife was expecting a “software key” to arrive in her email which she could download and use in an app to unlock the front door. That email was nowhere to be found and we had no phone number to contact anyone about this. Emailing our plight was the only option, so email we did. Fortunately we got a response right away, so we had the “key” ready to go as we approached the front door.
With the app opened and displaying the freshly loaded key, my wife stood in front of the door knob, held up her phone and pushed the key button in the app. Nothing happened at the lock on the door knob. Not a sound. The app was dutifully spinning a circle for us along with the message “searching” … “searching” … “searching”.
At this point, I remembered why the name of the app sounded familiar to me. We once had this same dumb “smart lock” brand on our own front door. This brand used Bluetooth wireless tech to pass the key around. If you’ve ever tried to use Bluetooth to play music in your car, you know how unreliable it is. When we had this lock on our door at home, I had to carry around a real key because I never knew if the lock was going to outsmart me again and not let me in. Needless to say, I replaced that lock with a different brand that does not use Bluetooth and have not had a problem since.
But here were are, staring at a spinning circle that says “searching” and no response from the lock; outsmarted again, this time with no real key. Back to the email option. No sooner did we hit “send” on the email when my wife reaches out to open the door. To our amazement it opens. Was it open the whole time? Did the person we emailed open it remotely? After we entered the apartment, as if to mock us, the lock worked every time when we tested it. Standing outside, when we needed it to work, not so much. (Engineering note: the door appeared to have a thick metal frame around a large glass window. We had better luck with the app when we placed the phone in front of the window instead of in front of the lock. Once again, the tech has trained us.)
Inside we are immediately impressed with the beauty of the apartment’s design. The walls are almost completely covered with floor to ceiling wood paneling with perfectly aligned seams where the closets, cupboards and drawers should be. We spend some time feeling our way around the paneling searching for the closets, cupboards and drawers. Opening them is not always obvious. Some require you to push the correct side of the panel to release the hinge. Others make you feel around the top or bottom of the panel to find a grip point. Once discovered, used and closed, I step back and see all the panels blending into one another. Where did I put my underwear? After five days we finally found the washer and dryer.
Every ultra-modern apartment needs ultra-modern lighting and the controls to go with it. In this case, each button on the wall mounted controls has a backlit label. As I would soon find out when I went to bed, the backlighting on these buttons is so bright it serves well as a night light, whether you want a night light or not. The labels seem obvious enough until you try to use the button. A firm push, and nothing happens. A firm push and hold, still nothing for one, two, then at three seconds the lights zoom up to full brightness. OK, that’s something. Lets try dimming a bit. Zoom again back to total darkness. It seems that after holding the button down for 3 seconds in anticipation of something happening, I have less than half a second to release my hold on the button to try and get any level of brightness other than full to happen. This turns into a perverse sort of game where I am once again outsmarted by the tech.
And now, what you’ve all been reading this far for. The toilet. It is by far the smartest piece of tech in the entire apartment with the exception of maybe the tv, which is basically a full blown computer anyway. But even the tv can’t anticipate my every bowel movement like this toilet can.
Before I unveil the wonders and madness of this robo toilet, I need to mention that I spent decades in the tech world designing products not unlike this one. They’re all basically a bunch of sensors, feedback loops and algorithms designed and built to work together to help you do something. In this case, to piss and shit. If you question my bonafides on this matter, I challenge you to look up the one patent that my name is on. I’m certain that will put the matter to rest. (Hint: issued in 2006, it’s under my full name, John Richard Rees, along with a few other names. This invention was a team effort. It would later get challenged in a law suit and I would be deposed by the attorneys on both sides.)
Back to the toilet.
We think that we’ve conquered, or rather been properly trained by, the tech that has schooled us so far in the apartment, when one of us enters the bathroom for the first time. We are immediately greeted by the toilet. No, it’s not a talking toilet. I’m sure they implemented that feature in their beta product trials and were told by the users how creepy it was. Instead, it greets you by simply lifting its lid. It makes a slight winding noise as it does so which you can easily imagine is a robo toilet version of saying “hello, may I be of service to you?”. We love to anthropomorphise our robo products, so it didn’t take long for my wife to start talking nicely to the toilet every time she entered the bathroom. I mean, it WANTS to service you each time you enter. The lid goes up, it makes that whiny winding noise and is just begging for a response. “No, not now robo toilet. I just want to brush my teeth.”
When the time comes that you do want to use it, I found out quickly that this is a female biased robo toilet. Either that, or it’s only designed for shitting, because no matter how long I stood in front of it imploring “I’d like to pee now robo toilet”, it never lifted the seat. When I finished, I walked away without lowering the seat or flushing, just to see what it would do (behavior I would never engage in under normal circumstances mind you). It flushed before I left the room. Nice. Then, two steps out of the room I hear the winding noise again. I go back to have a look and sure enough, it has lowered both seat and lid. Then it notices that I’ve returned and the lid dutifully pops open.
Now it’s my wife’s turn. Unlike me, she can use robo toilet hands free. Her butt however, is telling her something is wrong. It’s warm. Very warm. Hot even. I hear her exclaim something and ask her what happened. “My butt’s red. The seats too hot.” Yes, the robo toilet has a heated seat. And it’s too hot.
This should be an easy enough problem to solve, I think to myself. Where’s the off button for the seat warmer? On the toilet are 4 status LEDs and one button. One of the status LEDs says “Seat”. Yes, we know the seat warmer is on. The button says “Flush”, so no help found on the toilet itself. Mounted on the wall next to the toilet and just above the toilet paper dispenser is a remote control. There are several buttons on the face of the remote, all having to do with cleaning and drying your butt. The top of the remote has 3 buttons, none of them have anything to do with the seat. I tried to pull the remote out of it’s wall mount, but it wouldn’t budge.
Do we go back to the email option again to solve this one? Do we take shorter sessions in the seated position? Is this a feature to keep us from spending too much time in the bathroom? My wife helpfully suggests that she can line the seat with towels to protect herself. This is ridiculous, I say to myself, and then ask Google for help.
Google quickly points me to the owner’s manual for this robo toilet. It’s 66 pages long, and the first 9 pages are warnings of what NOT to do while taking a shit. I eventually find the page with the magic incantation to turn off the seat warmer. It’s on a button on THE BACK SIDE of the remote, which is cleverly mounted to the wall so that I cannot even see, let alone push any buttons on the back side of the remote.
My wife and I are on vacation. The last thing we want to do is fight the tech in our luxury rental apartment. I’m about to say, fuck it, and just unplug the power cord to the robo toilet. But then it won’t flush at all, and god knows what will happen when I plug it back in and it reboots.
I decided to take the plunge, so to speak, and attempt to override the owners desire to have this remote permanently mounted to the wall. Not having the correct tools, I found a kitchen utensil with which to improvise, and successfully got the damn remote off the wall. I turned it over and there it was on the backside … the “Seat” button, with an LCD display next to it indicating that the warmer function was set to MAX butt fry. A few taps on the button turned it off. Our vacation seemed to be back on track for some relaxation, both in and out of the bathroom.
Or so I thought. When it came my turn to sit on the thing and do my duty, I was happy that my butt didn’t get fried. However, as soon as my cheeks hit the seat I noticed whooshing and swishing noises coming from somewhere inside the bowl. All I could think was, maybe I should have read those first 9 pages of warnings in the manual.
As I mentioned before, I’ve spent some time designing products like this. I can empathize with the effort that went into the many functions they came up with to clean my butt. I can even understand the female centric design choices that undoubtedly were made by marketing folks who knew which member of the household was going to make the decision to buy the thing. Given all that, I am a bit perplexed they failed to implement the feature that all women want in a shared toilet. It may be excellent at cleaning your butt, but the robo toilet fails to clean up male urine dribble.
After publishing my robo vac story over a year ago, I soon went down the robo vac rabbit hole on Youtube. I found one thing worth sharing with you. It combines robo vac tech, hacker skills, and humor. This clever Youtuber hacked a robo vac to shout swear words every time it bumped into something. He then takes his new invention and sets it loose on an unsuspecting public. Hilarity ensues …
Maybe that's why I still do not even own a "smart" phone ...
We’ve had those toilets for years in Japan. They’re called washlets. On cold winter days, I really appreciate that heated seat. Glad to see they have finally arrived in the US. You should get one for your own home.