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The Magic Toilet
- Image by tokyofortwo via Flickr
My toilet is saving me $1200.
For a long time, my toilet ran. It was a nearly steady stream of money slipping down the drain. I knew that replacing the flapper was a quick job, but it was easy to ignore. If I wasn’t in the bathroom, I couldn’t hear it. If I was in the bathroom, I was otherwise occupied.
When I finally got sick of it, I started researching how to fix a running toilet because I had never done it before. I found the HydroRight Dual-Flush Converter. It’s the magical push-button, two-stage flusher. Yes, science fiction has taken over my bathroom. Or at least my toilet.
I bought the dual-flush converter, which replaces the flusher and the flapper. It has two buttons, which each use different amounts of water, depending on what you need it to do. I’m sure there’s a poop joke in there somewhere, but I’m pretending to have too much class to make it.
I also bought the matching fill valve. This lets you set how much water is allowed into the tank much better than just putting a brick in the tank. It’s a much faster fill and has a pressure nozzle that lies on the bottom of the tank. Every time you flush, it cleans the inside of the tank. Before I put it in, it had been at least 5 years since I had opened the tank. It was black. Two weeks later, it was white again. I wouldn’t want to eat off of it, or drink the water, but it was a definite improvement.
Installation would have been easier if the calcium buildup hadn’t welded the flush handle to the tank. That’s what reciprocating saws are for, though. That, and scaring my wife with the idea of replacing the toilet. Once the handle was off, it took 15 minutes to install.
“Wow”, you say? “Where’s the $1200”, you say? We’ve had this setup, which cost $35.42, since June 8th, 2010. It’s now September. That’s summer. We’ve watered both the lawn and the garden and our quarterly water bill has gone down $30, almost paying for the poo-gadget already. $30 X 4 = $120 per year, or $1200 over 10 years.
Yes, it will take a decade, but my toilet is saving me $1200.
Reputation Isn’t Everything
- Image by Getty Images via @daylife
I’m a code monkey by trade. Software development pays my mortgage.
I’m also–and separately–a small business owner and have been for years. I’ve actually got several side-hustles going, but only one of them is formal, organized, and incorporated as an LLC. A few years ago, a friend and I decided to go into business together, got certified by the state and start making some extra money.
I have recently discovered that two of the government agencies related to our business have been referring students to us. When our customers call the certifying organization, they are–at least some of the time–recommending us over nearly 200 of our competitors. You can’t buy that kind of marketing. At least, I hope you can’t.
How did that happen? How did two faceless bureaucracies decide that we were the company to recommend?
People talk. Over the last few years, we have worked to make sure people want to say nice things about us. What did we do?
1. We never lie. Our business is training. If one of our students asks a question I can’t answer, I admit it and promise to find the answer. Then, after class, I find the answer and email it to everyone.
2. We are reliable. If we schedule a class and just one person shows up, we hold the class. We have had classes with two instructors and one student. Our hourly rate sucked those days, but the students loved the attention and sent us business afterward. I’d never cancel if even one person is planning to be there.
3. We give it away. We give a lot away. If our customers have questions before or after class, we answer them. I spend time on related forums answering questions. Veterans take our class at cost. I try to give away at least as much value as I get paid for.
Now, this sounds like a sales page, but it’s not. I’m not mentioning the name of my company or even the industry, just so nobody thinks I’m trying to drum up business.
We have dropped a crazy amount of time and effort into building our reputation. With a firm foundation of knowledge and the 3 items I mentioned above, a good reputation is easy to build. A bad reputation is even easier. It’s been said that a happy customer will tell 1 person about his experience, while an unhappy customer will tell 100. Repairing the damage from the unhappy customer is much more expensive than just doing it right the first time.
Building a good reputation is absolutely critical for a successful business. Be ethical, honest, and helpful. Always be there when you say you will be, and try to give away as much as possible without actually hurting yourself. People will talk, so don’t give them a chance to say bad things without being liars themselves.
Reputation isn’t everything. You also need knowledge, marketing, and a product. Without a good reputation, however, the rest doesn’t matter.
Charity is Selfish
I try to give 10% of my income to charity. I don’t succeed every year, but I do try.
I don’t give because I’m generous. I give because I’m selfish.
If you give to charity, you are too.
I’m not talking about people who give to charity strictly for the tax deduction, though that is selfish too. I’m referring specifically to the people who give to charity out of the goodness of their hearts.
If I give a thousand dollars worth of clothes to a homeless shelter, I get a warm fuzzy feeling knowing that I helped people stay warm.
If I send $100 to the Red Cross for whatever terrible disaster happened shortly before I made the donation, it makes me feel good to have contributed to saving those lives.
The put-the-inner-city-kids-on-a-horse thing we do? Makes me happy to get those kids into a positive situation.
Donating blood? Yay, me! I’m saving lives!
While it’s nice to help other people, that’s not the ultimate reason I’m doing it. I do it because it makes me feel good about myself to help other people, particularly people who–for whatever reason–can’t help themselves.
That’s the basis of altruism. It’s not about helping others, it’s about feeling good about helping others.
The truly selfish, the evil dogooders, are the ones who want to raise taxes to give it away as “charity”. They get to feel like they are doing something and helping others while not actually contributing themselves and, at the same time, stealing that warm fuzzy feeling from the people who are providing the money to start with.
Evil.
Charity has to be done at a personal, local level or the benefits to the giver are eliminated while the benefits to the receiver are lessened. Bureaucracy doesn’t create efficiency.
For the record, if it’s taken by force, by tax, it isn’t charity. Charity cannot be forced. Forcing charity is, at best, a fraudulent way for petty politicians, bureaucrats, lobbyists, and activists to feel they have power over others.
Again, evil.
IQ Tests
I dislike stupidity. Particularly willful stupidity.
The problem is that you can be having a conversation with some one that you don’t realize is stupid, then they whip out the dumb-hammer and steal some of your IQ points by osmosis.
I hate that.
Since my lobbying efforts to have the willfully stupid get identifying facial tattoos seems to be failing, I’ve developed a system. My system helps me identify willfully stupid people and allows me to ignore anything they say, or–more likely–walk away as soon as I’ve identified them.
Here’s my system:
If someone expresses a specific opinion on a specific topic, I know they are an inefficient use of air and should be ignored, preferably from a different room.
What topics? I don’t pick topics that are necessarily controversial. For example, politics. I’m a died-in-the-wool Leavemethehellaloneitarian. Commies who want to take my money to fund stupid programs or stupid people aren’t a part of my IQ test. They’re just misguided. I’ll pat them on the head and change the topic, because I’m not interested in being either a history or an economics teacher.
The topics I go for are straightforward. It’s a matter of “If you believe this, you are beyond help.”
What topics?
- The moon landing was a hoax. Buzz Alrdin actually got the honor of punching one of these idiots. I won’t get into the science here because–as I said–I don’t want to be a teacher. Just 2 points from a human nature perspective: 1) The Russians were watching and good tell where the radio signals were coming from. If they could have embarrassed us, they would have. It was a Space Race. 2) Conspiracy 101. 13 people can keep a secret if 12 of them are dead.
- 9/11 Truthers. There’s too much stupid rolled up in anybody who think 9/11 was an inside job. Engineering, human nature, cinematography, and critical thinking are all topics they can never master. Just walk away. They probably won’t notice they are talking to a wall for a while, anyway. If they do get offended, it’s no big deal, because there’s no way they can remember your name longer than it takes to take a couple of breaths. Seriously, they became Truthers because it’s the only job they could get that didn’t mind retraining them after each coffee break.
- Holocaust Deniers. I almost skipped this one because it’s hard to describe them without resorting to language I try to avoid here. Ten million people died as a direct result of evil. Evil that ran a successful PR campaign on television. Evil that was witnessed by millions as it was happening, and by tens of thousands more as the concentration camps were liberated and mass graves were uncovered. If you deny this, you are not only beyond help, you are beneath contempt.
There are some other groups that get this to a lesser degree. Anti-vaccinators get a pat on the head. They are benefiting from the herd immunity provided be the people who get their kids vaccinated. If the rest of us went that route, we’d grow some fabulous epidemics again.
What about you? Do you have a shortcut system for recognizing people better left ignored?
