Have a seat.

Continuing the urination theme begun yesterday...

I spotted something in a restaurant men's room recently that I had never seen before. (How's that for the opening of a True Confessions letter?)

Get your mind out of the gutter!* I mean this:

What's with the little lip on the side of the seat?

Looks like some kind of growth. Like a plumbanoma.

I've seen a lot of toilet seats; I thought I'd seen them all. Not just the U seat, which Fr. Martin claimed was invented by a drunk who got tired of being smacked on the neck. No, I've seen big cushioned handicap seats, electronic bidet seats, hippie wooden seats, glowing night-light seats, and even this:

I wanna rawk.

But I've never seen one with that weird lip thing.

Are you supposed to lift it with that? Because I kick it up with my shoe anyway and I don't know that it makes it that much easier.

After some searching I found out what it is---the Kohler Stronghold Elongated Toilet Seat with Integrated Handle. I like that name---Stronghold! Because I want a toilet that will hold in its contents no matter what. And thus, the growth is as I suspected, a handle for raising and lowering the seat.

I wouldn't mind so much using the handle if the seat was in my house, because in your home you're essentially touching only a limited number of hinders by proxy. But in a public restroom you could be making proxy contact with hundreds of hinders, and that is not happening, handle or no. I'm sticking to the shoe method. And I am not alone in this.

So there's the answer to the question. As always, your man Fred is willing to go to any lengths to track down the stories that matter to you.

The worst part was taking the picture, because A) there was no guarantee that the lock on the men's room door worked, and explaining that would have been difficult, and B) I figured I had about a 50-50 chance of dropping my phone in the toilet and becoming one of those poor slobs who needs the jaws of life to get his arm out of the can when he dove in after his phone. Which would be sad considering that I wouldn't even touch the seat.

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*Looking at you, Stiiv.