We haven’t reinvented the wheel, so why the toilet flusher?

I’m madly waving my hand up and down over a sensor-operated toilet flush panel, which isn’t registering my existence. I switch up the motion, maybe a swipe to the right, Tinder-style? Nothing.

Does the job, presses no buttons: an old-fashioned, pull-chain cistern. Credit: Golding/Fairfax Media

After a few minutes, my mind goes to dark places: is this a The Sixth Sense scenario where I am (spoiler alert) actually a ghost? I continue my alternating hand gestures like an incompetent clairvoyant, wondering if my wee is destined to mellow in there until the next occupant judges my lack of water intake.

The frustration I experience at this moment is inordinate to the situation, which I’ve noticed happens when something high-tech doesn’t work. I’m going to call it “gadget grief”. Gadget grief cycles through the same processes as the seven stages of grief, as I have, from denial (“Surely this high-tech toilet isn’t broken; it’s brand new!”) to anger (“Work, you overpriced piece of junk, or I’ll short-circuit your ass!”) to bargaining (“If I play it cool, will you work?”) and everything in between.

Technology has made our lives easier in many ways, but there are times when automation is completely unnecessary. Pressing a button on a toilet isn’t that bad, is it? It doesn’t create burnout or give you a “menty b” (mental breakdown in Gen Z-lish). Sure, it might be less hygienic, but we’ve all learnt how to wash our hands since the pandemic.

The real menty b comes when you have to remortgage your house to pay the IT whizz to fix your high-tech toilet.

I love good engineering and have publicly declared my love for my cordless Dyson vacuum. I recently bought an upgrade with a fancy mop head that spins fast as it spits out a slick of water. Aside from the fact that you have to clean it out after every use, lest it start to smell like Eau de Wet Dog, it’s great when it works. The day something goes wrong, it’s either getting shipped off to the Dyson factory for who knows how long, or I’ll get creative with spare parts off Amazon and YouTube tutorials.

Now, we’re on the verge of having all of our floor cleaning automated, with a series of robovacs that not only clean and mop your floors but clean themselves afterwards and don’t complain about the fact that while they were doing this, you were sitting on the toilet for half an hour on YouTube. And speaking of toilets, “smart” toilets aren’t too far away from dutifully gathering health data from your daily deposits.

There is such a thing as “overengineering”, and while we’re busy developing self-driving cars or smart fridges that order a cheesecake when they detect you are thinking about one, no one is asking, “Do we really need this?” As much as cleaning the floors after my kids have been creatively expressing themselves with mashed potato is the bane of my existence, there’s an intrinsic satisfaction in being an active agent in the process, even though I’d rather be doing Wordle.

In his book The Design of Everyday Things, Don Norman writes about the paradox of complex machines: “When people fail to follow these bizarre, secret rules, and the machine does the wrong thing, its operators are blamed for not understanding the machine, for not following its rigid specifications. With everyday objects, the result is frustration.” Or gadget grief.

High-tech gadgets can make our lives easier, but the complications and expert care required to fix them can far exceed their conveniences. “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” should be the creed of every burgeoning inventor who wants to reinvent the wheel or the toilet flusher button.

After all, isn’t modern plumbing and sanitation a miracle in itself? Just because we can invent something doesn’t mean we should. I don’t need a smart toilet to analyse my water intake; the person who uses the toilet with the broken sensor-flusher after me is welcome to, though.

Cherie Gilmour is a freelance writer.