Have you ever sat on a $600 toilet seat? I know I never have. Indeed, until I had the misfortune to shop for a new toilet seat, I had not the merest inkling that there was such a thing as a $600 toilet seat.
To be clear, I am not talking about the cost of the whole set-up, the porcelain, cistern, seat, U-bend and the rest. I am talking about the plastic bit you put your bum on, and there are legitimate businesses in New Zealand selling, apparently legitimately, this bit for over $600, a state of affairs that seems beyond belief.
It certainly was for my 87-year-old father, a self-confessed conspiracy theorist, when I alerted him to this shocking fact. When, during our weekly phone catch-up about our exciting lives, I told him of the existence of $600 toilet seats, he, too, expressed surprise and even attempted to mirror my outrage.
“For that price,” I told him, “it should do the business for you!” How we laughed. But it later became clear that Dad hadn’t believed a word I’d said.
The following week, after we’d thoroughly discussed the weather and the possibility of rain, he told me that after getting off the phone the previous week, he had gone online to see whether such a thing as a $600 toilet did exist.
What he actually meant was he went online to see whether his son was telling him outrageous porkies.
It is hard to decide what is more depressing: some outfit charging $600 for a toilet seat or my father thinking I would lie to him about the price of toilet seats. Perhaps he thought it was a conspiracy theory.
The discovery of the existence of the $600 toilet seat was occasioned by what I’ll call a mishap with the existing toilet seat in the ensuite at Lush Places.
Confounded by which pill I had swallowed of the two I am required by my doctor to ingest each morning, I sat down heavily on the toilet – the lid was down – to try to figure out whether, in my usual morning fog, I had just taken the white one or the pink one.
If the pill mix-up was my first mistake, sitting down heavily on the toilet was my second: the seat made an almighty cracking noise as it broke.
“Oh my god, I’ve just broken the toilet seat!” I bellowed to Michele, who bellowed back, “Good, I hated that thing.” She’d been telling me to replace it for ages.
“What makes a toilet seat worth $600?” I asked the women in the showroom of the first plumbing supplies place I visited, a place that actually sells $600 toilet seats.
The one in the Kewpie doll dress didn’t seem to know, but the other one said it was to do with the quality of plastic, the hinge, being “antibacterial” and lasting longer, none of which seemed much justification for charging $600 – unless it’s also covered in gold leaf, is self-warming, plays mood music while you wait and is the model preferred at Buckingham Palace.
I asked a plumber, who was waiting next to me, whether he’d ever knowingly sat on a $600 toilet seat? “No,” he said, “but I’ve put a few in.”
At the next plumbing supplies shop, I found myself in conversation with another customer, Larry, who was complaining about someone whose name I didn’t catch but who owed him and other people in Masterton a lot of money and still walked around town like his “dick was bigger than his shoe size”. We agreed that this – meaning owing money all over town – was a bad thing, though we seemed to be on a different page when it came to Donald Trump.
Once Larry had departed, I explained my situation to the helpful young woman at the counter, who agreed that it’s plain nonsense to spend $600 on a dunny seat. She soon sent me on my way with a more realistically priced replacement.
I still have no idea what it feels like to sit on a $600 toilet seat. But I can tell you my $60 job works perfectly.
