One robot toilet please

For only 28,999 yuan, it's yours

I live in a lovely, 100-year old house. It’s not big -- really, it’s six rooms, including three bedrooms. When we moved in, there was but one bathroom. We added another soon thereafter.

They are both upstairs.

Which means if you’re downstairs drinking a six-pack of beer and need to use the bathroom, you have to go all the way upstairs. We’re talking like 12, maybe 13 steps. God only knows.

This, of course, is terrible, and as a result, I will, in rare occasions, like blue moons or Thursdays, go into the backyard and do my business* with the dogs. (*To be clear, we are only talking number 1s here. I’m not an animal.**) (**OK fine, I’m a little bit like an animal, but not because of this, it’s a mere symptom.)

Anyway, not having a downstairs bathroom, while obviously a first world problem, is a problem I wish I didn’t have.

As a result, I decided to hire someone to knock out walls and install plumbing and fixtures and create a bathroom downstairs. While I have decided this -- I decided it 25 years ago -- I haven’t technically done it. Truth is, outside of an addition to the house, there is really no place for a bathroom, even a half-bath, downstairs. (It’s so cosmopolitan of us to refer to a bathroom without a tub or shower as a “half-bath.” Really, we should just call it “a toilet with a few People magazines.”)

Well, as it turns out, it appears my days of having to climb all those stairs to use the bathroom (or shoo’ing the dog away) will soon be a thing of the past, as I just read about the Chinese company Yueban and their robot toilet.

Yes. The robots have come for our waste.

Here’s the gist: The Xiaoban is summoned by voice or remote, it drives itself across the house to wherever you happen to be, and it’s built, sincerely and admirably, for people who can’t easily get to a bathroom on their own. Over there it goes for 28,999 yuan. About four grand.

So. For 28,999 yuan -- and don’t think I didn’t notice they couldn’t bring themselves to charge a clean 29,000, they had to shave off that last yuan so I’d feel like I robbed them -- I can own a toilet that follows me around the house.

I am not above this. I need you to understand the depth of how not above this I am. I have spent 25 years failing to build a downstairs bathroom, and here comes a downstairs bathroom that builds itself, charges itself, and cleans itself with ultraviolet light -- which is more than either of the two bathrooms I currently own has ever once done for me -- and it comes when I call it.

Now, I should probably feel some shame here, because the Xiaoban is a genuinely good and decent invention. It was built for people for who getting to a bathroom is not a beer-related lark but a real, daily, dignity-grinding ordeal -- and for them, a toilet that rolls over on command lands somewhere between a godsend and a miracle. Hats off to the engineers in Shanghai.

And then there is me. Two working legs. A house I’ve lived in for decades. A downstairs bathroom that exists only as a recurring dream. I am, to be clear, not the person the Xiaoban was invented for. I am the person it was invented in spite of.

I want one anyway.

A quarter century I left that bathroom unbuilt. And now, without a flicker of hesitation, I’m ready to hand over four grand so I never have to walk to one again.

Progress.