It’s past time for commodes in cars
Perhaps my proudest accomplishment – other than writing 1998’s chart-stopping “Gettin’ Jiggy With It” – is that I recently drove from Homerville to the middle of Atlanta in three hours and 20 minutes.
That’s 248 miles. In a car, not a plane or a UFO-shaped balloon or a zeppelin. A regular automobile.
How’d I do it?
I’m glad I asked. The conditions had to be perfect. It was on a Wednesday, not the weekend (too much traffic). For my arrival, I was going against the traffic in Atlanta at around 8 p.m. (Note:
If you hit the Stockbridge area on Interstate 75 at any other time, expect serious congestion). I didn’t drink anything before I left, and, thus, only took one quick bathroom break in Perry. And, apparently, the Georgia State Patrol had the day off.
Most importantly, I was alone. See, when I make the very same trip and have the family in tow – wife, three kids, et al – add at least two hours to the sojourn. Really. A 248-mile journey takes over six hours, and maybe 248 days off my projected life span.
The more people you have in your vehicle, the more you have to stop.
“Can we stop? I have to go to the bathroom.”
“Can we stop? I’m hungry.”
“Oh, look at that yard sale. Let’s pull over for an hour and buy nothing.”
“Look, there’s a man on the side of the road. He looks like he needs our help. Can we stop and get involved with his life, like an episode of ‘Highway to Heaven’?”
The requests to stop are relentless, and the kids also ask to pull over sometimes, too.
I have devised a pretty simple formula to estimate how long a trip will take with the family via automobile. It is the number of miles divided by 60 + 2. Using that formula, a 120-mile family trip takes four hours. A (yikes!) 360-mile trip lasts eight hours.
The main obstacle to making good time travelling with a group is the bathroom issue, and most regular automobiles don’t have room for a port-a-let.
But they do have seats ... which spawned my latest brilliant idea.
The vehicle we usually take family trips in has seven seats, two in the front, three in the second row and two in the third. We rarely use them all. What if one of those seats lifted up and doubled as a commode? How hard could that be? They do it on buses, but unlike a bus, this would just be a toilet seat, not a full-fledged bathroom.
Think of the time your family could save this summer on a trip to the beach if instead of having to pull over at a convenience store or rest area every 45 minutes, you could just send little Jimmy to the back seat to take care of business.
Granted, there could be some issues with such an innovation. As usual, I have them addressed. For instance, any privacy concerns could be resolved with a long, thick curtain. Moving a person to the “commode seat” could be aggravating and awkward, particularly if they are driving unless, as I suggest, you treat it as a cheerful game of musical chairs. Then, it would be joyous and fun. Or not.
Of course, having only pretended to be an architect at my last class reunion, I don’t have the engineering expertise to devise such a wonderful concoction. I’ll leave that to the nerds.
But, please, make it snappy. I am scheduled to take my family on a 480-mile trip in July, or according to my current calculations, 10 hours of my life, or, with a commode seat, two hours less.