A Boy and His Toilet: Best Friends Forever

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In 1996, a great fad took overAmerica. It was bigger than the Beatles, more important than any cultural item had ever been. That year, McDonalds took a break from throwing their usual cheap plastic toys into happy meals and took on one of the biggest fads of all time- the Beanie Baby.

I desperately wanted these tiny animals. As a fourth grader, I knew that everyone that was anyone at Green Springs Elementary would be constantly accompanied by Goldie the Goldfish or Chops the Lamb.* I had to get them. I knew that, with these tiny animals at my side, a whole new world of possibilities would open up.

That’s why, when reading the news today, I understood the story of Dustin Kruse, a four-year-old inNew Berlin,Wisconsin. He, much like myself, wanted that one thing that he knew would create hours, even days, of fun.

The difference is that he wanted a toilet.

Before Christmas, Dustin and his mother were at a local hardware store. While most kids would be distracted by just about anything in the store besides toilets, Kruse became transfixed by a very special throne. This, after all, wasn’t just any waste receptacle. No, this was a $380 Kohler model with double flush technology.

“He flushed it,” Mama Kruse told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, “and he’s like, ‘Mom wouldn’t that be great if I could have this? Could you imagine all of the things I could do?’ And then he’s looking up in the air and he’s thinking. He’s like, ‘I am asking Santa Claus for this.'”

Of course, Santa had no interested in hauling a toilet on his sleigh. Those things are heavy, plus the elves are terrible at differentiating working plumbing from a showroom model. There’s no way he was getting involved in that.

So poor Dustin went without his dream toilet through the holidays. I would assume there was a great deal of crying and complaining about his pooping accommodations. Dustin’s dreams, it seemed, just were not meant to come true.

Fortunately, Mama Kruse had a different idea. She gave the Kohler design center, the world’s foremost toilet design center a call.

“Hi, Kohler,” said Kruse. “I have a young child who loves your toilets. He dreams of relieving himself in one someday. Is there a way we could have a toilet?”

The Kohler phone operator was very caught off guard. There are not a lot of calls to a toilet design center and the calls that do come in are usually local teenagers asking whether their toilets are running, then recommending they hang up the phone and catch them. “Uhhh…okay?”

With that, Dustin’s dream had come true. Just days after his birthday, Kohler came to give him the crapper of his dreams.

Now, Dustin can spend his days flushing his troubles away. It’s a great thing for a kid, growing up with the best toilet Kohler can give away.

Dustin will definitely need that toilet for companionship in the years to come. The school years are going to be rough for a kid this obsessed with toilets. His grades are sure to suffer as he arrives late to every class, solely because he could stop staring at the urinals in the boys’ room. No kid is going to be invited to a birthday party when the first thing they ever hear him say is, “What kind of toilet do you have?”

Yes, Dustin will, most likely, live life with a nickname like “Toilet Kid” or “Captain Latrine.” It won’t be an easy life for him, but that’s okay.

Dustin has his good old Kohler. The experience on one of those bad boys is something you can’t put a price on.

*Why do people think it is cute to name lamb characters after a product you get from its death? That would be like created a kid-friendly cow character and then naming it Steak the Cow or a horse character named Gluey the Horse. It’s a bit disconcerting, if you ask me.

Related articles

• Toilet-loving boy, 4, gets free commode (upi.com)
• 4-year-old boy loves toilets gets the gift a dual-flush toilet from Kohler Company. (althouse.blogspot.com)
• The Kohler Numi – Most Expensive Toilet In The World (vinodkumartiwari.wordpress.com)

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