I don’t ask a lot of a toilet. A basic working toilet is good enough for me. Better than good. It’s a chair with a hole in it that makes everything go away. Away is good. For a million years, Away was just a matter of gravity and a digging tool. We moderns really have it great. And whenever the toilet doesn’t work as designed, but instead sends a murky fetid stew ever higher up the bowl into screamy territory, we’re beside ourselves. And maybe backing up a little.

So I’ve been merely amused at the existence of the overachieving toilet that does everything but clip your toenails. I figure they’re of Japanese design. Japanese people live in dense masses on a smallish island and amuse themselves by coming up with problems that don’t really need solving, and solving them. Thus the Toto toilet. I never expected to come face to face with one. Let alone bum to gasket. But I visited Linder and she had two. The remote control is right there on the tank, beckoning.

Obviously I was going to have to try it out. Getting on a Toto toilet and wiping yourself old-school would be like drilling out the floorboard on a Lexus and powering it with your feet like Fred Flintstone. Still and all the same, I couldn’t bring myself to push a button on the remote at first. I was trepidated, as if I was strapped into the capsule of the Challenger.

Somehow I expected there would be a big spray of water all over the nethers followed by an inordinate amount of time with the blow-dryer, and there you’d sit, trying to do the eco-conscious calculations of wood-pulp saved vs. water and air warmed up, plus there are lights down there, I guess so the robots can see what they’re doing, but what if there’s a camera too, and a whole secondary industry in poop-porn which is where they’re making the real money? You know there’s a market out there.

There’s a market out there for every damn thing.

The remote control is advertised as allowing you to “control your comfort in the palm of your hand,” but heck. Men have been doing that for millennia. Even if you don’t use the remote, the machine whirs when you sit down. It’s either the sound of water warming up to the pre-set temperature, or it’s the sound of the toilet judging you. (Linder thinks it’s the fart exhaust system, which would be a great idea, and if properly vented to the outdoors, might discourage door-to-door solicitation.)

After a day or two, of course, I had to try it. I selected the button with an icon of a spray on a fanny. I will be go to hell. It was not a generalized indiscriminate splooshing at all, but a targeted gentle jet that pretty much nailed the bull’s-eye. I was impressed. And the next button targeted frontsies in a similarly precise manner.

One problem is I might need a wider target. As an older American, I can’t currently count on my pee to fall straight into the toilet. Sometimes it detours onto my butt cheeks. The only option there is to move your personal apparatus around the spray until you think you’ve hit everything that needed hitting. Same for less-than-tidy poop incidents.

The next few icons don’t seem to represent anything intelligible or do anything when pushed, and then there’s one at the bottom that would appear to spray you with hail pellets. I didn’t push that one. I’ve heard that the use of ice can be unusually satisfying in certain scenarios, but those scenarios would require a pulsating spray for several minutes first.

If there’s a button that does that, women would surpass men in Time Spent In The Loo. And they don’t.