A Household Plumbing Statistics Model
The Seat Position Problem
A Monte Carlo model of every household's quiet daily tax: how much time gets spent putting the toilet seat where it needs to be, based on who's using it and what they came to do.
Time lost to seat adjustments / year
hours : minutes : seconds — simulated annually
That's – of visits requiring a flip, at – seconds each.
seat: down
Model inputs
Adjust the household's real-world habits. The simulation reruns automatically.
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Total adjustments
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Adjustments / day (avg)
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Of all visits
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Long-run P(seat left up)
Cumulative time lost, day by day
Simulated running total across the period selected, compared against the model's analytical prediction (dashed).
What's causing the adjustments
Every flip has a trigger: someone needed a position that wasn't there.
So — is "leave it as you found it" the best default?
Yes. A courtesy flip — resetting the seat in advance for whoever's next — costs exactly as much time as any other flip. It only pays off if you guess the next visitor's need correctly, and it costs extra the moment you guess wrong, so on average it never wins. Currently – of visits need the seat up — but that share turns out not to matter to the conclusion.
Optimal courtesy habit
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Time saved per year vs. current setting
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How the model works
Each visit draws a gender, a purpose, and — for men doing "number 1" — a stance. That determines the seat position this visit needs. If it doesn't match the current position, someone spends the adjustment time fixing it. If the visit was a standing use, there's also a "courtesy" chance the seat gets flipped back down afterward — and that flip costs the same time as any other, whether or not it turns out to help the next person.
| Visit type | Seat position required |
|---|---|
| Anyone, "number 2" | Down |
| Woman, "number 1" | Down |
| Man, "number 1", sitting | Down |
| Man, "number 1", standing | Up |