More Short Stories

More humorous short stories. Remember, I said humorous - not touching, moving, life-changing or inspirational. If you want inspirational go watch Oprah.

When I was about 7 or 8 years old, my mom was filling up the bathtub for me so I could go get myself clean. I go to get in the tub and there I found my 4 year old sister in the tub, with all of her clothes on, including her shoes and socks. She thought she heard Mom telling her to get in the tub and not me.

I got in an accident in high school, was only doing like 10 mph when we collided with the other car. It looked like no damage was done to my car, but just before I turned it off I heard the engine revving up really loudly. "I don't think I should drive it home," I told the cop. "It looks fine. You'll be fine. Take it on home, all will be fine." So I drove the car on home with my mom following me in another car. The volvo I was driving started idling faster and faster, and soon I was doing 50 mph without even touching the gas. I soon left my mother behind. We get home, "Christian Thomas Farmer - what do you think you are doing driving that fast?" "But Mom! I couldn't help it! I wasn't even touching the gas!"

In high school I had a friend who could eat really fast and also eat a lot. Now I know what all of you are thinking, "Yes, I eat really fast too, and could probalby out eat your friend. I come from a large family just like I'm sure your friend did too so we had to eat fast before the food was all gone." My friend came from a family with 2 total kids in it. One day we each ate 1/2 a large deep dish pizza. He was still hungry so he had 2 double quarter pounders with cheese, fixed himself a milkshake, and ate 4 puddings, at which point we were out of food. He would eat cereal with the large salad serving spoons to get the food in his mouth fast enough. He would try to do the same with Jello pudding cups. One day a grownup friend of ours, Dean, walked in on us in the kitchen, and here's my friend, trying to jam a salad sized serving spoon into a pudding cup. Dean just gawked at him for a few seconds, turned around, and walked right back out of the room.

For you BYU students out there, you can go into Route Y and change your personal information. Under there they have a spot that says "preferred name". My coworker and I were fooling around with it, and she showed me that you can put spaces and all sorts of characters into your preferred name. So I put in: "I love Brittany A Shuman", and we had a decent laugh at that and forgot all about it. A few months later I get this phone call from my mom, "Christian, who's Brittany A Shuman?" Turns out BYU with their glorious form letters put "Dear I love Brittany A Shuman" at the top of my letter.

I have the ability to grow hair that is very thick and very curly. I grew out a fro one time, a nice big luxurious curly fro, and wore it everywhere - to school, to play, and even to work. One day at work I couldn't find my pen. I looked everywhere for it, but couldn't find it underneath the desk, under my keyboard, next to the phone - my pen was nowhere to be seen. And then my supervisor said, "Nice pen Christian". I reached up and felt my hair - Blast! I had left it in my fro!

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Ever Wanted a Door Made of Snow?

And now we have a picture of a really sweet prank:


I heard a bunch of people laughing outside my apartment - and came out to see just what the heck was going on - talk about a sweet sight. Evidently the guys who did it to the girls put it up, then ordered a pizza, and just sat outside and watched as people would walk by, pause in astonishment, run to their apartments, and run back out with a camera. This is now in my top 5 favorite things I've ever seen - along with the Coliseum, St. Peter's Basilica, and the fountains at Versailles.

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They Rued The Day

So at this one place I worked last year, which may or may not be mentioned in this article (okay - it is - i just wanted to sound all mysterious and cheesy like Tom Cruise does in many of his movies), our employers gave us this form to fill out for our "self-evaluation" asking us to honestly justify what we were worth as employees. One coworker told me if I were to just put down so much information and overwhelm our employers it would be hilarious, plus he would give a free dinner. To quote him, he told another coworker, "I didn't think he would do it, until I remembered just who I was dealing with." So read on if you wish folks - it's 3644 words long of me joking and poking fun at management terms. To quote another coworker, "This is great! You say everything we want to say but are too scared to!"

Not Yet Full Performers

*Goals Met – hmm – I never set any goals really, and once they were set I was thinking ‘saves – well – I’ll try, but I won’t be pushing too hard to keep these people from using dial-up’ or ‘proactives – what the heck is a proactive anyway?’ sure I use the term but I still don’t think I’m completely sure of what it is and since I’ve been here for 6 months and 12 days as of January 24th, I feel like I should know these terms but I don’t. Can we make up a glossary of Nuskin terms for the newcomers? That way when Jason says something like GWP or DWP or best of all ADR they can look it up to see what it means. And the terms have to be defined in real-life terms that people can understand, not things like “a website utilized by distributors to actively increase revenue via the upselling of more product”. Hmm, but I’m supposed to be evaluating myself not others here.

*Takes Ownership of Calls – I’m still scared to call some people back when dealing with scoring issues. Plus I’m still confused as to what DEFINES ownership. It seems that the system of escalation only places the escalated ticket as being in the active call list of the first person to escalate it – I have placed a few extra pieces of escalated information on a ticket that was already escalated, and the ticket was never placed on my active ticket list – but I was still emailed about it 3 weeks later when the person needed a response. And at that point I was scared to call them back – it’s not fun to call back and tell a person that their machine is scoring correctly – especially when you have already done this once before and then they INSIST that it is scoring correctly. It’s like trying to tell an insane person who likes you (romantically) that you don’t like them back but they keep on insisting that you will in the end. It just doesn’t work sometimes to tell them ‘NO!!’ What am I supposed to do about it? Well, I’ll just have to learn to plug away at it and bear the pressure. I’ve also decided that I need to make up a sign on the wall that says “I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and gosh darn it, people like me” so that whenever a scoring call back goes awry I can look at that and be in my little happy land, and then I’ll be able to handle absolutely anything.

*Time Management - This could definitely be managed better in that I could always be researching the website for more answers on where different things are found. However I believe that playing ‘javanoid’ in between phone calls is a big stress reliever, and sometimes helps me to perform phone calls more accurately. By picturing all of the little shouts of anger that I have going on inside my head and envisioning the blocks in javanoid as being tiny little complaints like ‘Please don’t tell me about your pet dog’s runny nose and how you wish there was lifepak for pets because I can’t do anything about it and the queue is really really long right now and both myself and every other person in the call center and every customer/distributor on hold at the moment wishes that I were off of this call right now so that I can handle more phone calls and make this a more efficient place!!’ it helps me to have less stress when dealing with customers, and thus allows me to deal with them in a more efficient and happy manner. Also it gives me a better sense of self-worth when I beat javanoid. However, no – I am not a full performer and could definitely do some, nay many, things more efficiently than I am now.

*Goals Are Increased As They Are Met – I never set goals when I was supposed to. I know that I said I would, but I didn’t, and for this I am truly sorry. Plus, I really should have put up a little piece of paper for me to put tick marks on for every save that I have performed. I would have about 3 or so tick marks on there by now. Plus, I’m not really sure if I ever did meet my goal – I can’t remember what it was, which is another thing I must do more efficiently and proactively if I am to increase my goals as they are met.

*Know and Understand Nuskin Values – I believe that I know most of them but I’m not really sure what they are. I haven’t looked at the ‘Values’ section of insite in a while and my current value system is based on ‘do whatever possible to get the customer satisfied as quickly as possible so that I myself might be satisfied as quickly as possible’. This might seem like a selfish point of view but I believe that the customers & I have the same goal – be on the phone for as little time as is possible. For the other values I must read up on them more often – and then I will sit and ponder them and if I still don’t understand them I will pester the range rovers about it until they are sick and tired of me contacting them and will block me from their instant messenger list. Hopefully the latter won’t happen, but it is a feasible possibility nonetheless. Not a probability, but a possibility.

*Positive attitude toward work – I must admit that there are times when I do wish to come to work, but there are many times when I really truly dread coming to work. Most of the time I am also rather willing to sacrifice $19.14 by going home two hours early so that I may remain sane. I have a positive attitude towards my coworkers, but not always towards the customers. However, I believe that if I keep on telling myself, “I love dealing with iPhones and customers who think we should still sell them” I will eventually believe myself and be able to become a ‘Full Performer’ in this category as well.

*Positive attitude toward Distributors – There are many distributors that are a pure joy to work with, but the minute I hear the words “I am a blue diamond!” (spoken so that you can hear the exclamation mark) I immediately tune out much of the conversation and wish to not help these people even though I know that I should because they are the footing of the company and without them we wouldn’t exist. Even though I know that it’s rather hard to care when you’re being verbally berated. Now some blue diamonds, like Mark – hmm – can’t remember his last name – are real pleasures to work with – but I have yet to develop a complete positive attitude about 100% of the distributors.

*Partnership with Work Force Management – my partnership with work force management exists and I use it properly. However I probably haven’t been up to the exceptional level as of yet, because I have yet to bake a full 10 course meal for work force management. In working conditions we do great – as far as being partners, I didn’t realize that I was a partner with work force management. Yes, they’re great people, but I personally believed that it was more like they were the leader and I was the lacky. I will have to use the ‘partnership’ version more often and try to implement some of my ideas about the workplace. Like I always thought that we should have a ‘disco theme week’ where we have strobe lights and disco balls and don’t forget the smoke machines, and we all wear polyester and bell bottoms, and Kevin can grow a fro, or if he can’t grow one he could possibly wear a wig. We can have gold chains – not real gold mind you, but rather, fake gold – that have the Nuskin logo on them. Now that I realize this is a partnership relationship I will have to go about implementing this. If I am incorrect in interpreting this partnership relationship please don’t tell me until after I have fully implemented Disco Week. I’m sure everyone will enjoy it.

*Works on each call to build positive relationships with Distributors and Customers – I’ve never actually used this as a focus on my phone calls. I never thought of the distributors having a relationship with me – I would generally think of them having a relationship with their customers, but never thought of them having a relationship with me. I was better at this when I first started, but have since gotten to the point where I don’t always listen to what people say. I even do this when talking with my parents and siblings these days as a force of habit, and really need to work on not doing that. For both the distributors sake and for my family’s sake.

*Shipping agents offer appropriate exceptions and incentives – when I do become a shipping agent, I will concentrate on this. At the moment all I can do is visualize and prepare myself mentally for the challenge, and am currently trying to think up appropriate ways to offer exceptions and incentives to people. One thing that I thought of but probably isn’t appropriate is to include a picture of me smiling in every package that I ship so they can come to know that I shipped it with care. It probably also isn’t quite appropriate to offer to not only ship the product for free, but to give the customers a little cash inside the package along with the product. It would be great if we could always do that, but we can’t, and pretty soon they’d be wanting us to offer these incentives all the time. For this reason I will perform a random opinion poll of 10 different people on each of my ideas before I put them into action.

Full Performers

*Schedule Adherence Standards Met – as far as I can tell I am within the correct schedule adherence standards – however I am currently unsure of where my schedule adherence lies. I know that I should be better about this that I should always be asking “Brook!! What is my schedule adherence?” However, most of the time when I have that thought – lo and behold a phone call comes in – and not just any phone call – I mean the phone calls where it’s about scanner scoring and the person says to you, “I’m not sure I can trust this product” and you give them the best answer that you can make up, without giving credibility to your ability to properly analyze scanner scores, since I have no ability to do so I must never claim any ability to do so or the distributors will be after me with questions like the press goes after George W. Bush. – “why won’t it do this? How come the scores don’t stay constant? How come the scanner can’t predict how many years are remaining in my life and how that will change if I use LifePak for the rest of my life?” either that or it is a phone call where the poor unknowing person has signed up for yahoo high speed internet and can’t send any emails, and then end up calling up Yahoo only to find that they can’t GIVE us their password, and when we do reset it and they have to reset all of their wireless routers and you STILL haven’t been able to fix the problem. All of a sudden I find myself forgetting to ask Brook what my schedule adherence is, and then it will pop up at some random time – most likely on a Saturday at 11:00 when Brook isn’t there, and then I’ll forget to email him as well. I’m sorry Brook – I’ll email you about this right away so that I can find out how lousy my schedule adherence percentage is and start correcting the problem right away. I vow to have 110% no – make that %175 schedule adherence – I’ll find some way to do it and do whatever it takes to get it done.

*Welcome Screen Tickets Logged Appropriately and Resolved in a Timely Manner – This seems to be able to be split into two different qualities here. For the first half of this I am a full performer – sometimes logging too much for tickets. Granted I haven’t reached the point of detail where I say that the person breathed a little more sharply at this point of the call than he had been in the rest of the calls, but sometimes it feels like I type much that isn’t necessary into the ticket – like I could work on phrasing things better. The ‘Resolved in a Timely Manner’ section I have become much better at. When I first started working here I had absolutely no idea what to do with the active references, I just thought it was a pretty little number so I didn’t start calling any of them back until around November or so. However the ‘resolved in a Timely Manner’ section should still come under the ‘NOT YET FULL PERFORMERS’ section so consider this part to be in there, since I sometimes achieve that goal, but do not always achieve it in as timely a manner as possible. I will become a full performer for this part in time, however to become exceptional I would need to start calling them back before I actually received the phone call. In order for me to do this I will build a time machine, and then go ahead to see who will be calling me up at what times, and when their problem started, so I can start calling them instead of making them call me. Only then will I be an exceptional performer.

*Schedule Adherence – see above for this answer, I believe you would much rather not read the same thing twice – if I am wrong then write me back and tell me to write this thing twice. Or highlight this in yellow and write in big letters in bold red ink BAD!! WRONG!! If you do that I will write the same section twice – I won’t even cheat by copying and pasting.

*QAS errors limited – Um, I’m ashamed to admit this, but I have no clue what a QAS error is. I can’t even think something up like Queens and Sons. So for now I will just assume that I am a full performer until I am told otherwise.

*RMA Errors Limited – Remanaging Mass Atomically – if that’s what this means then I would be an EXCEPTIONAL performer. However since I don’t know what this is either, I will just have to assume that I am a full performer, nothing more nothing less.

*Communicates Their Needs to Their Team Lead – I believe that I go to my TL in most cases when I need something. However, I don’t believe that we have yet developed the level of trust where I could trust him with everything. For example, I’m still scared to tell him when I’m thirsty and to ask permission to go fill up my water bottle – I should do this more often. Or if I happen to get a paper cut I probably wouldn’t go tell him that I needed a hug but would instead sit at my computer with a stoic look on my face and just hope that he would know instinctively that I need one.

*Motivated – In most cases yes, but I’m not sure that I’m motivated by the proper motivations. Plus I’m not as happy or as energetic as I could be. I don’t have signs on my cubicle saying that ‘I Love Nuskin!’ Nor do I try to talk my friends into buying iPhones or signing up for us under Dial-up. For some reason I don’t feel motivated about this yet, but I feel that this will come to me with time and patience. Perhaps much time and much patience, but come to me it definitely will.

*Displays Ability To Work As a Team - Yes, I do exhibit this trait in that I am willing – not always fully willing, but many times grudgingly willing – to take phone calls from people who are a little hard to handle and who I was very very happy when we were accidentally disconnected and then I tried to call them back but couldn’t reach them and they called in and requested to talk to me – yes, I am willing to take those calls. I am also very willing to not be selfish about taking all the calls for myself and will gladly (not grudgingly) transfer a call over to another tech agent when the person on the phone requests to do so.

*Uses the proper channels of communication with other departments – As far as I know I do, and since this is a self-evaluation, I must say that this is definitely true. There is that one time where I kind of spammed the whole call center with an email, but luckily my team lead corrected me on this misbehavior and showed me how to retract the spam before it truly became spam. In the end it only turned out to be an email to about 25 people instead of to 500 or so people. I have since changed my ways, and will no longer spam people. I also use the Sales Range Rovers on occasion, without understanding if it was proper to do so. However when I did this it was for a proper reason. Another thing I do is occasionally send out emails just for fun to other departments – I have to admit that I’m proud of my little essay I wrote up about Movie Magic DVDs, and ever since I got the thumbs up from Steinbrenner I’ve offered multiple people from other departments the chance to read it. And of course they say ‘yes’ because they’re polite lovely people who don’t want to hurt my feelings even if they didn’t want to read it and then I send them a copy of it via email. This can probably be misconstrued to be not using proper channels of communication for other departments – but I still believe that I am within the limits of full performer when it comes to communicating with other departments.

*Maintains an appropriate, positive attitude toward others - This partially depends on what is meant by 'others'. If when you say ‘others’ you mean coworkers, then yes I do. If when you say ‘others’ you mean customers then I must admit that I have sometimes wanted to remove the vocal cords from some of the customers, and this probably can’t be considered ‘an appropriate, positive attitude’ but when dealing with coworkers, I must say there’s not a single coworker that I actually don’t like working with. They’re all pleasant and nice and they even understand when I have to beat up Kevin’s frog and cause a little noise to get my stress out. Hmm, that might not be appropriate or positive either, so in order to become exceptional I will have to get rid of that as well.

*Positive feedback from distributors – I have gotten positive feedback from some distributors, unfortunately I can’t recall the reference #’s at the moment or exact names. One lady from St. Louis actually mentioned wanting to meet me when I came home from the break. I probably won’t meet her, but it was definitely a nice sentiment.

*Offer opinions and suggestions on process improvements – I do offer these whenever I have them. I probably offer them too often in some cases and should instead worry about the things that I can change and not worry so much about the things that I cannot change. However, it is awfully fun to worry about things you cannot change sometimes, if only to make yourself feel better about yourself and say ‘If I was in charge – this would be better by doing this’ even if I know it’s not true and if I was in charge I would become burnt out in two hours of being in charge and would just try to maintain the status quo.

*Participates in the Hot Dog Program – I have once so far even though it was shot down and will do so twice more at least. Granted two of the ideas are actually Kevin’s but he commissioned me to write them up for him, and they’re very good ideas and hopefully the company will implement them.

Exceptional Performers

*Overtime Hours Are Worked Only When Approved by Management – all of my hours I’ve ever worked overtime (0 hours) have been approved by management. I have 100% in this field, and that counts as an ‘Exceptional Performer’ in my book.

*Does not waste company resources – I am using my own printer paper to print this document – and my own ink – thus ensuring the continuing success of the company. I figured that if every employee – all 3000 or so – printed up 5 or so pages a day pretty soon that would be costing the company $750 a day in printing charges alone. Think about what this could do in the long run – in one year that would cost us $273,750 which would be the equivalent of about 10 or 11 newly hired tech support workers’ salaries which could no longer be hired, which would lengthen the queue, which would increase distributor dissatisfaction or decrease distributor satisfaction depending on how you look at it, and soon we would all be out on the street, just because we wanted to read a funny story that was sent to us by a third cousin in an email.

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BYUSA Elections: Your Farcical Entertainment For The Year

Every year around this time many students suffer from overwhelming boredom and complete studying burnout, and luckily for those students every year BYUSA comes through in full flying colors in their goal to provide students with activities and entertainment throughout the year and thus relieve the stress and pressure that students feel. They provide a beautiful activity that can entertain and make people laugh like no other, and make people forget their winter depression. “Just what is this miraculous activity?” you ask? You haven’t been able to guess it yet? Why it’s BYUSA President Elections!

Yes every year when you think you couldn’t possibly go on any further, up come these candidates in these elections, with their prancing and their preening and their kowtowing to people of every state, running around campus just hoping to shake everybody’s hand.

“Hi there! How are you doing? Feel my firm handshake - there - doesn’t that make you think that I would be an able leader and would sincerely represent your issues in the University? Yes - that’s right - I care, about you! I promise you with all sincerity that I will stand firmly in whatever metaphorical chalk circle that I draw for myself!”

And they shove a flyer into your hand talking vaguely about how they will fight vigorously and strenuously to make sure that YOU Mister Average Joe or Miss/Misses Average Jane Student will be firmly represented by them to the university, and will make sure that your needs are met and voiced in University Meetings the whole year round.

And then once they’re elected they drop off the face of the planet, and the only thing that you, The Average Student, ever see or hear about them is an occasional article in the newspaper written by them on how the university is doing well and the students are well and the teachers are happy and everybody is just peachy and that because of their (the constant vigilance BYU is a state of happiness.

Luckily this year we have an article from someone on the inside, BYUSA Vice President (former BYUSA Vice President by the time you will have read this article) Max Hunsaker. Let us delve into some of what he has to say now.

“Over the past three years I have worked with each student body president and can agree that some promises have not been fulfilled.”

Yes, this is very true, albeit a bit of an understatement. Since my days of a freshman in 1996 I have heard many promises by BYUSA and so far the only one to come to pass is: The Cougar Eat now accepts debit cards as a legal form of currency. We students do not blame this on the Presidency, for we know that they would dearly like to bring changes to pass, but they have very little power to do so.

What is the function of the Presidency anyway? When University people are thinking of making changes in policies are they required to report to the BYUSA President first? Before the Bookstore implemented their new buyback policy did they first run up to the BYUSA President and say, “Excuse me Mister/Madam President, we must have your opinion on this policy before we put it into effect!” Or perhaps the Route Y people went to the Presidency and asked for their concordance with the idea of fining students $25.00 for not updating their personal information? Of course they didn’t! Would they do it in the future? Of course not! Why should they? The BYUSA Presidency has no power to do anything, no actual sway in matters of actual policy changes. They have as much power to effect change in this university as cute little squirrels and chipmunks do to stop construction companies from tearing down their homes to build human homes. Would you listen to a squirrel if he asked you not to tear down a tree?

Next quote by dear old Max: “I am waiting for the day that students stop blaming BYUSA for the actions of people they themselves elected.

Are all BYUSA people so out of touch with the students? We ‘students’ or ‘civilians’ don’t mourn your actions but rather your lack of ability to take action! What does BYUSA actually do for the university anyway? “ Last semester alone, more than 33,000 students attended the activities provided by the association.” This is all fine and dandy and you all deserve gold stars for your efforts, but why should we average ‘students’ care when you’re going to pick a new BYUSA President? Why should you represent us as a student body? Why should we not elect instead one of the hardworking janitors, who have served more than 11,000,000 students per semester in restroom services alone, to represent us? What better way to show our gratitude for a job well done!

And what better way to show our gratitude to BYUSA in future elections than by nobody voting at all.

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The Worst Landscaping Ever

We now present to you the Worst Landscaping Job Ever:


(Click on the picture to enlarge it)

This house is so weird looking that it belongs on a TV show or movie set, or in another country, but definitely not the United States. It's located at 520 East 2000 South Orem, UT. Look at this satellite picture of it! It's the house in the bottom left corner of the picture with the pink lines around it - You can see these walls from space!

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The Poor Fool, He Had No Idea What Hit Him

So today my roommate got the hankering to bake a cake - so that's what he did.

He worked hard at it - put some nice icing on it - it was a beautiful looking cake. Then he went to taste it. The top was awesome, not dry at all, then he bit into the bottom. "Well, hmm....that's odd," he said and he put the cake up for grabs from everybody, warning everybody that it tasted just a bit funky. I tried a piece just to see what it tasted like, tried the bottom, "Well, this is odd - but I swear I've tasted this before, just not in a cake...kind of...smokey..." I said to myself, then something hit me.

"Dude - I know what's wrong with your cake! This cake pan you used - it's the pan that I use when I barbeque." "What?!" "Yeah - you know the pan I stick under the meat with some water in it to keep the meat moist, and to catch the meat drippings? That's this pan your cake is in." "Ohhhh...that's hilarious!" "Yeah it is - don't worry - it's cleaned out and everything." "K - good, let's just leave it here and have everybody else taste it, but not tell them about it, and see if they notice anything."

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The Worst Sin of Them All

So I went home for a few weeks over the Christmas break - and was hanging out with my 2 sisters and my parents (I only have 2 siblings so all of us were home for Christmas) and we were genuinely enjoying each other’s company. Laughing, watching movies, playing board games, talking about life in general, and then all of a sudden the mood changed, a wave of tension came over us, and a horrified voice came from the bathroom, “Christian - how could you do this?” Do what? What did I do this time? It was something that men are accused of daily, something that brings more horror to the minds of women than seeing you burn a copy of Pride & Prejudice right in front of their faces: I had left the toilet seat up.

Now this will be getting 2 different reactions from everybody out there:

Reaction Number 1: “Oh my goodness gracious! I totally agree with those girls - no decent young or old man could ever do such a thing! It’s sick – sick I tell you! I hope to high heaven that he never marries. I must warn all my daughters/sisters/cousins/friends/acquaintances/bitter enemies to stay away from this wretch of a man!”

Reaction Number 2: “Yeesh! It only takes 2 seconds for you to put the toilet seat down! You’re acting like I took your pet hamster and threw it down the stairs….hmm, that sounds like fun….”

If you gave Reaction Number 2, you are a man. If you gave Reaction Number 1 you are either a woman or a man who has been married for a very long time and has forgotten what it is like to be a single man.

This is something that has been plaguing men since the dawn of the toilet. The second John Crapper’s wife saw the toilet, do you think she said, “Oh – how nice – no more trips out to the outhouse in the middle of winter!” Why of course she did! And right after that she said, “You best not be leavin’ that there toilet seat up John.”

This is something that all married men are scared of. If George W. Bush was trying to hammer out a peace treaty with say Osama Bin Laden, and he wanted some common ground they could talk about, all good old Dubya would have to do would is say, “You know 2 months ago I left that there toilet seat up for the first time in 10 years – and my Laura just let me have it.” And Osama would chuckle and say, “Oh yes, I know just what you mean,” and pretty soon he would understand that deep down all humans are similar to each other and all males have become the keepers of the sacred position of the toilet seat.

In some ways I can understand the women’s position – they want the seat down for various reasons:

"It’s gross! I don’t want to have to touch it to put it down!" That is a very good point! Females are very dainty and delicate and should be protected from having to ever touch the toilet seat.

"I hate it when it’s in the middle of the night and I don’t turn the light on to use the bathroom, and then the toilet seat is up so I fall in!" We men honestly wouldn’t mind if you turned the light on to use the restroom in the middle of the night. If it gives us the right to occasionally leave the toilet seat up we’d be darned ecstatic about it.

"When it’s night time and I need to pee, I’m too darn tired to realize the seat is up and sometimes I fall in!" Yes - this is true, doing complex things when you’re groggy is often very hard. May I just point out that men are often just as groggy as women are when they wake up in the night time, and men often have to wake up to pee as well. What do you think would happen if a man was too groggy to think about putting the seat up first? Would this be a desirable thing?

"But can’t men pee while sitting down?" It is much less efficient to do so. We prefer efficiency.

"But it’s so much work to put the seat down all the time!" Technically, from a physics viewpoint it’s more work to put the seat up than to put it down, because when you put it up you’re fighting gravity therefore requiring more force than when you put the seat down. May I also add that if we aren’t required to put the seat down every time we use less energy over all, and as we all know energy conservation is a good thing because the more energy we expend the more entropy we cause, and the more entropy we cause the sooner the Universe will die. Of course this will still happen quite a few billion years off or something, but the best time to plan for the future is today.

"But leaving the toilet seat up is just WRONG! I’ve been taught that my whole life by my parents who always taught the boys to keep the seats down!" When you say wrong, do you mean that is against the law? Are you saying that if a male leaves the seat up he can be thrown in jail for committing a crime? Or are you saying that it is wrong in a religious sense and any male who violates this sacred tradition is thus condemned to an millennia of suffering and punishment and forced to constantly put toilet lids down for the rest of eternity?

Ladies, we are not demanding anything that we are not entitled to! We only ask for toilet seat privileges equal to your own, and for a little understanding if we leave the seat up!

If you truly desire, in your heart of hearts, to never ever have to see the atrocity of a toilet seat left up ever again you only need to do one simple little thing: buy your males a urinal.

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