Tag Archives: World Toilet Day

What Brits do on the toilet

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I remember when Chapman got a blackberry, the first in our little group to get one. He sent me an e-mail, and then another shortly thereafter:

“I wrote and sent that e-mail while sitting on the toilet.”

Today, it’s almost impossible to enter a public restroom without wondering who’s talking – it’s someone sitting on the toilet with verbal diarrhea into their cell phone.

So in honor of World Toilet Day, a survey of more than 2,000 people commissioned by charity Tearfund found that reading, chatting and texting are among the favourite activities of Britons on the toilet.

The study suggests more than 14 million people in the UK read newspapers, books and magazines on the loo.

The poll points to eight million people talking – either on the phone or to family – and one in five send texts.

The study also suggested people mostly thought about food while on the toilet, and that men were more likely to look around for a distraction than women.
 

Something I can get behind … or on: World Toilet Day

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The World Toilet Organization, the other WTO, has proclaimed Nov. 19, 2008, World Toilet Day.

That’s because 2.6 billion people, or 4-out-of-10, have no access to a toilet.

CNN reports that Singaporean social-entrepreneur Jack Sim founded the non-profit World Toilet Organization in 2001, as a support network for all existing organizations. The group meets once a year to network, discuss sanitation issues and work together toward "eliminating the toilet taboo and delivering sustainable sanitation."

Goal number one: Making sanitation speakable. "What we don’t discuss, we can’t improve," insists Sim.

I’m all for that. With only a couple of weeks left till the increasingly uncomfortable Amy delivers, my conversations are soon to be dominated by the color, consistency and frequency of our baby’s poop. Oh, and the explosivity of it all.

Although as guest barfblogger Michelle of New Jersey points out, shouldn’t World Toilet Day come before Global Handwashing Day, which was Oct. 15, 2008?