It's a toilet. Just because you can see the deposits of yourself and others doesn't mean you don't need to wipe the seat or have decency, Keegan. Do it. Clean up after yourself. It's still a toilet and it's still a public toilet, so take care of it. Welcome to Privy. Privy is a podcast about toilets and bathrooms recorded live.
normally from my home bathroom, but this week you are, we are here in the, in the best Western of on tour on words, Ontario, Oregon, hotel room number two, two, two bathroom. I think it's fitting that they gave me a room with three twos. because we're going to talk about some twos today. ah Thank you for joining me. I am Hunter Hoover, your toilet enthusiast and host from the very creaky, as you will hear this episode, hot seat. Welcome to Privy. I'm very glad you're here.
Man, it's Privy summer. Welcome to Privy summer. Cue Olaf's uh summer music. Spring's in the air. da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da out here in Idaho. So we stayed nearby in Ontario, Oregon, because it's actually closer to where we wanted to stay in Idaho. So yes, summer is here. It is upon us. I know folks throughout the country, many of you have gotten out of school.
If you're still in school, the school I work for, we're still going to school at the point of this episode coming out. So hang in there. We're almost done. Summer is upon us. And with summer, two things come along. Outdoor activities, which we're going to talk about today. outdoor activities, everybody loves them. know, COVID shut down the state fair last year. Not this year. The state of Oregon is in full swing to have the state fair. Get to the state fair.
And when you are at outdoor summer activities, there are a number of discomforts that are going to come along with outdoor summer activities. These ah include sunburns, good old burns, some of y'all turn into lobsters, uh others of y'all don't, whatever. Heat leading to sweat. That's me, I get the sweat. Allergies, man, it is allergy season. If you don't have allergies, you're blessed. Tis the season for Allegra and Zycam, not Zycam, Zyrtec and all of those other lovely allergy fighting friends.
You just got to get the histamines down. You got to get the histamines under control before the histamines take control of your face. That's essentially how allergies work. Yes. But another outdoor summer discomfort comes to us and it directly relates to what we know and love here on Privycast. And that is, is being outside in the heat and the sweltering summer. and this dang toilet seat is so squeaky at the Best Western. It's the squeakiest toilet seat.
Best Western squeaky toilet seat extravaganza. Enjoy. But is this idea that you might be outside enjoying your summer activities and not have a place to go to the bathroom, not knowing if there is going to be a nearby restroom, plus if it's hot like...
There is no worse feeling than feeling like you have to take a deuce and it's hot out and everything is sweaty and then your heart starts to like, but because it's like, no, I've got to poop and I don't know if there's a nearby restroom and now things are heated more so than they were.
But this week we're going to be talking about a uh breakthrough and a... uh piece of human ingenuity and innovation which is going to revolutionize and has revolutionized the comfort of bathrooming where we're unsure of bathroom amenities. This week on privycast they've been known by a number of names. Johnny on the spots, honeypots, honey buckets, turdices, not Tardis's, turdices. But we here at Privy like to refer to them as they are commonly known, their lay term, porta potties.
You may hear porta potti and think, how can that possibly be ingenuity? Like the last time I used a pora potti, it was full to the brim with human brown mixed with the whack blue. We're to talk about the whack blue. It's not Gatorade. And how can that be human ingenuity at its finest? You probably have had a bad experience with porta potties. I guarantee you that you have had at least a stinky encounter with a porta potty and you enter and peer into the weird lake of human leavings and trash.
Don't throw trash in there. In the chamber below. How can this be good, you say? Because without it, mean, most, if you're a person who regularly stands to pee, you can go stand and pee and do your thing, yeah, whatever. But without it, we are going to have a bathrooming situation on our hands, especially when we have summer outdoor activities and there are going to be a large number of people congregating in one spot.
And we usually put porta potties where there's going to be an expected influx of people that is more than what is usually in the area. So yes, they are essential if you will. and they allow us to do things, particularly summer things outside that are maybe farther away from restrooms than we would like if we're going to be outside for prolonged periods of time. I need here to note a distinction, a line that we are going to draw in the sand, you will.
Privy cast line in the sand, outhouses are not porta potties. Outhouses are not porta potties. And you might hear that and say, Man, this is Hunter just reaching, grasping for straws, trying to find a topic for another episode. You know what? You're not wrong. But also outhouses are different than porta-potties. And here's why. It's literally in the name. Porta-potties. It stands for portable potties, portable toilets. And as the name notes, they're portable. Outhouses are houses.
They're not designed to be portable. They're structures built over a hole or a tank in the ground, but they are separate from, one might even say outside of the house or other building. So now that that is settled, outhouses are not porta potties. This week on privy, we're completely ignoring outhouses. Forget them. We're doing not right now. Get out of here outhouses and get in line. You'll get your week and this ain't it. We're talking all things porta potty. Where did they come from?
How do I interact with them? And Why do they make me feel uneasy sometimes? To talk about porta potties, of course, we can't just talk about porta potties. We have to go to all places ancient Egypt. So grab your time machine, grab your plane ticket. We're going to ancient Egypt. Most Egyptian toilets, if you're going back to ancient Egypt, if you weren't going in a hole in the ground, you went into this like weird limestone construction toilet.
But archaeologists have uncovered in the tomb of Ka, which again, I don't know how to say all these words, their names, I'm gonna butcher them. If you are an Egyptologist or Egyptian yourself and you wanna just write in and correct me, feel free, but it's Ka. But these archeologists found this wooden portable box with a hole in it that they would lay then a container or pot under. The earliest port-a-potty dated to the 14th century BC.
And it is more what we would think when we think of like a camp toilet. Like you drag this toilet out and you put it on the campsite and you like maybe dig your scat hole underneath it and you scat into it and then you cover the scat hole. That is kind of what this ancient Egyptian port-a-potty was like. But we have not quite, we, so it's technically a portable toilet. I'll give you that.
but we have not made it to the big plastic constructions that we have in our brains when we're thinking of port-au- You might hear this and ask yourself, why would somebody put a toilet in a tomb? Well, I'm glad you asked. Archaeologists and me, I think, believe that they put these portable, put these portable toilets in the tombs so those buried there can use the can in the afterlife.
Remember that in many of these ancient cultures, human waste and the things that humans produce are impure or they make someone unclean and thus to interact with their deities, they would have had a concern to not have that as a situation. So they're buried with these portable toilet situations so that way they can hopefully remain pure before their deities in the eyes of their gods. Something I have never given any thought to. Wait a minute. There can be bathrooms in heaven?
Huh. You think there'll be bathrooms in heaven? Then came the ancient Greeks. The ancient Greeks uh used chamber pots, which used the uh same method as cause portable toilet. You poop in a pot, then empty it out later. Technically portable, but still not technically a porta potty. We're still talking about portable containers to relieve yourself in. And if this was the case, if we wanted to say that like, A portable container that you relieve yourself in is what constitutes as a porta potty.
Then every Ziploc bag and Walmart bag on the planet is a porta potty. And we don't think that. We don't believe that. And don't be deucing into a Walmart bag and then just tossing it out. Don't do that. I mean, it's better than the street, but you know what I'm saying. It's weird. Although you could get the legs through the like handle holes and it would be like a weird diaper situation. Hmm. This might be an experiment. Anyway.
This method of relieving yourself into a poo-septical, TM, poo-septical, and then emptying it later was considered the standard of porta-potty technology for years. Used by royalty and soldiers alike, this was the standard. You poo in a container and you dump it away from you later. That is, until the 1940s, America. The Docs, Long Beach, New Jersey. Sammy, Sammy at the Docs. Sammy's got a crew and their job is unloading. We gotta unload and load the Docs, boys.
Nearby, the local Taco Bell. That part is definitely not real. um The local Taco Bell, this part's fiction, opens up and his crew has been hitting up the new spot. Have you had their burritos? Because they're chock full of weird beans and I don't know how feel about it. And Sammy notices something about his crew on the docks as they've been hitting up this new lunch spot. Loading times are lagging and unloading times are lagging. What's going on?
Our men have been efficient and they've been on it. Sammy's dudes are the dudes for loading and unloading. So something has happened. What's going on? And so Sammy decides to watch and see what's going on. He ponders it. And then young Dougie runs from the dock. Clenching his backside looking with terror at no. no, where am I gonna do this? Yo, Dougie, where are you going?
I got a poop boss And he runs to the nearest building to do his deed drops his drops his poop and then slowly makes his way back to the docks 20 minutes later, Speedy Petey, he got his name for being fast at loading and unloading. Speedy Petey repeats Dougie's move. He does the same thing. He runs like clenching his backside. I was looking for the toilet. Dougie told him he can go use the nearest place. He runs inside. He goes to the bathroom. Pooping is driving down loading times.
So Sammy concocts a plan. And above ground, enclosed portable toilet for privacy with a tank for cleanliness that can be emptied at the end of the day or when it is full. And when you move to a new dock or a new boat or a new whatever, you just portable it with you. Portable toilet. And thus the first Porta Potty, a real certified Porta Potty was born 1940s and better yet, New Jersey. Thank you, New Jersey. And better yet, we can put it on the ship. We can put it on the boat. Name a place.
I can put the porta potty there. Name a place. I can put a porta potty there. And thus the first porta potty improves work times and it was originally designed as a workplace benefit for those who needed to go on the job, but we're probably getting in trouble for like taking a long walk back to the nearest toilet. Revolutionary.
You know, got to imagine, uh I got to imagine here that like if you were one of Sammy's dudes and his name wasn't Sammy, but if you were one of his guys that like he rolls in with this like portable toilet, you're like, man, you just cut down on my like three minute breaks to go poop. Like now, now I don't get my walk to and from.
It's kind of like when Michael Scott in the office is like, well, I like the little cups because then I get to take a whole bunch of trips to the water cooler to fill up my cup. These port-a-potties designed for the docks in New Jersey would go on to be used for WWII soldiers in camp, aboard military vessels, and at airfields where accessing bathrooms would have taken a lot longer.
And because this is the real purpose of the port-a-potty, to cut down the amount of time it takes you to get to a toilet, it it puts one nearer to you. And these early porta-potties were wooden constructions. And as a result, we have a couple problems. First, wood is exceptionally good over time at soaking up the, as I would call it, yellow fluids, and it would rot and begin to stink. Even when emptied, the wood would hold on to some of the pee. Not good, bad, very bad, I would say.
And thus you're going to have to replace these things more often. Second, damp wood is heavier than not damp wood. So these things were heavy constructions at first, they're wooden, but they became even more heavy over time as they begin to be pee and dookie soaked, thus less portable, not as great on the portability side when we start to get some wet in here. Last, And possibly the most important in my opinion are splinters. No one wants splinters from a wooden toilet.
Why did we ever make toilets out of wood? Splinters in the backside are all the time bad. Never do it bad bad bad. Around the 1960s, the porta potty got a facelift, along with America in many ways. Wood was out and fiberglass was in. This solved some of our problems. It dealt with the soak-ed-ness a bit better. Fiberglass can still soak up fluids, but not as much. And it was much lighter and much more portable. Fiberglass, step in the right direction on portability.
However, if you've ever had a fiberglass splinter, you know that they're worse than wood splinters. So, as a humble potty enthusiast, fiberglass also bad. Bad for splinters. bad for bungholio. These lighter materials meant that they could be put in harder and harder to locate places. Special porta-potties built for mines are constructed. These were special because they needed to alleviate or offset the fumes of human scat and leaving being trapped in the mines.
You can't have all of the bad gases from human body to be trapped in the mines when they're just sitting in the toilet tank. You can't do that. They can't be breathed in. especially for long periods of time. No good. They're put at the top of high rises for high rise construction workers. You could put a porta potty there. It makes you wonder if any of these guys ever just like before the porta potty were like, I ain't going all the way down there.
I'm just going to let Brown fly off the side of this thing. Also, I hope it was a good way to seal it off down from the top as well. Like nobody wants Keegan's Dookie flying out the side of it and onto the streets below. It's bad. Don't do it. But for much of this time, the porta potty technology blended itself to what I would like to call big stank. Big stank. At its outset, you were essentially just plopping waste into a collection of just either nothing or a water lake inside the thing.
The stink was horrendous. And with the stink, When it was convenient to do so, people would opt for the bush or a slightly more private area of the street. We're back to square one. You're, you're, we're back to square one then. Like you have taken a step backwards now. So we have to do something to deal with the ungodly stink. Which brings me back to the thought if there are toilets or bathrooms in the afterlife, would the things produced in them smell bad? It makes you wonder.
To answer the call to reduce rank, a mixture of formaldehyde, formaldehyde. You you see these videos of like people from Australia or people pretending to do an Australian accent, trying to like say different words and like portfolio is really good. I wonder what formaldehyde is like. I'm not an Australian or do a good Australian accent, but like I bet formaldehyde would be a good one for them to do. Formaldehyde deodorizer was created to cut down on the stink in the porta potty.
However, this mixture was a thing taxing on the waste management and sanitation areas. they began to, almost as quickly as they began to use formaldehyde as a deodorizer, they had to look elsewhere because the formaldehyde was actually breaking down other parts of the waste management system. And so, They came up with what is now known as the blue mixture. It was created to cut down on the level of reek produced. This blue mixture is not only a deodorizer.
So when you think of deodorizer, you're thinking like Poo-Pourri or like Febreze, that type thing. It deodorizes the snake. This blue mixture is not just that. It's actually a biocide. It, it, kills the living organisms that come into contact with it, the bacteria. And it actually serves to disinfect the tank, your poop, your urine, as well as the air around it. Blue mixture. Port-a-Potty Science. Later, smell technology allowed ventilation.
If you ever look at a modern porta potty, they often have a vent tube running up the back that runs into the crap chamber, and that is to ventilate the smell up and out of the tank itself into the open air, thus bypassing the toilet seat, which we're gonna get to on an etiquette piece here in just a little bit. It's innovation. It's pure innovation, pure human innovation. But the fiberglass over time didn't interact with how well with like our leavings and our newly introduced chemicals.
So now, like not only are the human leavings making the actual structures themselves worse, but like the chemicals and the things we're putting into the tank with the human leavings are starting to interact poorly with the fiberglass. So we got to do something. Polyethylene plastic began to be used in port-a-potty construction in the 1980s and it is still what we use today. We're 40 years later, polyethylene plastic.
Lighter, easier, less prone to deteriorating, less prone to splinters, all improvements. Human innovation and ingenuity, polyethylene port-a-potties. Say it with me, poly... ethylene porta-potties. So the porta-potty. But where do we go from here? Like we're up today. We're 40 years in on polyethylene porta-potties. We improve and we improve and we improve. You add sinks, you add lights, all the things that you would find in a normal public restroom, make them portable.
Get a bigger truck, bigger trailer to haul it. Heck. even make it to where you don't even take it off the trailer. If you've been to big outdoor summer events or like concerts or like state fairs, sometimes they'll have a line of porta potties on a big trailer and you just walk up to the trailer, walk in the porta potty and it doesn't even leave the trailer. Portable sinks, portable urinals inside the porta potty, hand sanitizer. You gotta get the hand sanitizer these days.
Like we're not going to say COVID, I already did, but you gotta get that. You gotta pump the hand sanitizer. Get it. Get it flowing. full porta bathrooms, potty included. How far we have come from ancient Egypt, but porta potties still stink sometimes. They get dirty because there is this belief that if it's a porta potty, you don't have to try to keep it clean. And thus we enter some of the etiquette piece of porta potties. You're wrong.
It's a toilet just because you can see the deposits of yourself and others. doesn't mean you don't need to wipe the seat or have decency Keegan. Do it. Clean up after yourself. It's still a toilet and it's still a public toilet. So take care of it. Porta potties are good. Imagine any situation where there is a porta potty that is expected for you to use it and then imagine that that porta potty is not there.
You might think they're whack until they're gone and you need one and you can't get to it. They're not ideal. Nobody's saying they're ideal, but they're necessary. They save water from flushing. Porta-potties actually save like gallons and gallons of water compared to regular toilets. They're more sanitary than doing it in the streets or in the bush or in a bag. Keegan. Porta-potties are good. and for some etiquette pieces of porta potties. Like I said, wipe it up.
Another thing is, put the seat down. If it has a closable lid seat and you can close it, put the seat down. This does two things. It keeps one, we're gonna get to a Hunter's Anecdotes here that's gonna come into play, but it keeps you from dropping stuff into the toilet. There's a seat barrier, wonderful, very good. But the other thing that putting the seat down does is it helps, the air flow not up out of the seat hole and into the chamber of the porta potty.
It helps the air flow from the tank up out of the tank vent and into the open skies where you later will not have to breathe it if you are getting up in that porta If there is a porta potty for uh handicapped individuals or folks who have a handicap, don't you just leave it open? Leave it open. It's not like a regular bathroom where it's like, you know, you're probably a dingus if you're doing it, but I get it. It's bigger room. That might that you got to leave that open. You got it.
Last but not least, there's often a phone number inside the toilet. And if it looks like it's been some time, they'll usually have a cleaning log inside the portable toilet.
Porta potty for short if you look and it's been some time since it's been clean feel free to give that number a call and say hey like you got a Porta potty down here that needs some servicing um if it runs out of supplies call the number It if it runs out of toilet paper call the number if it runs out of hand sanitizer Call the number if it looks like it's getting full let whoever's in charge of the event know or call the number Take care of it. Don't let it go Porta potty's are very good.
Oh, also, if you're in line for a porta potty, it's first come first serve. Like, if you want to be like nice and let somebody go ahead of you, that's fine, but like, you can't, if there's a long line, you can't let them skip 40 people. It's not, not good. Bad news. Also, most porta potties are gender, like, neutral. They don't have a men's and women's. Um, so just be mindful of what you do in there and that somebody who is not like you might have to deal with that. That's what I would say.
They're good. And they are also the source of this week's Hunter's Anecdotes to keep you afloat. I have two anecdotes when it comes to porta potties. Porta potties are very, very cool. I both hate them and am fascinated by them because nobody really ever likes to use them, but like you will use it. Do you know what I mean? And it's been a long time since I've pooped in a porta potty.
I usually try to reserve my porta pottying for peeing, but man, when you poop in a porta potty, you can get some mad sound splash coming off into that blue lake down. First Hunter's anecdotes, as I've shared, I work at a public high school and sometimes students get angry. And this story to do my best to preserve anonymity, two students had been at it all week. You they're going at it and they're kind of bickering and picking at each other and doing all this thing.
And this one day, you know, the verbal things start flying like, you're this, you're this, meh, meh, meh. And they're going like high schoolers who want to fight with each other go. and they get going and they decide to throw a couple swings at each other and meet another staff member just kind of in the room trying to deflect it.
And finally, the one student who in my brain was not the instigator, but that's not really important here, he grabbed student A's backpack and on site at our school at the time, they were doing some construction work to build a bigger and better gym. And when you have construction work and thus construction workers, you're going to have porta potties for those workers to use. And on his way out, he snags the other kid's backpack and takes off across campus. And, you know, he's gone.
Later on in the day, you know, the kid comes back, everything settles down and the other kid is like, he took my backpack. Where's my backpack? And he doesn't have it anymore. And we're like, man, like he threw it somewhere or whatever. We come to find out like one of the construction workers or someone, don't know how we came to the knowledge, but this kid had stuffed the other kid's backpack into the porta potty tank, effectively thus ruining everything inside.
But man, just uh what a capitalized legendary move of like, checkmate, I jammed your belongings into the port of toilet. Legendary and smelly. Don't do that kids or adults. The second um, porta potty story. And as I don't remember why there were porta potties on my school campus at some point, probably a similar reason, but there's this, oh, it was probably some sort of track and field event. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
But you know, sometimes, sometimes kids are mean to each other and sometimes it's bad and sometimes we look back on it and we go, man, what a great roast. That was funny. But this one guy that's like, I was probably a freshman kid, he goes and gets in the porta potty. And I remember a couple of the seniors took a bungee cord out and bungee corded the porta potty shut. And just walked away because you don't have to hold it, like you can just sit back and watch.
And the kid like tries to open it and is like, bungee corded, like, and he's just cannot get out of the porta potty. And then you just start to hear the scream, help. Help! Like, I can't get out. I'm stuck! And he thought we had bar... Not me, I didn't do this. But he thought they had barricaded the Porta Potty shop when they just bungee corded it. And it's a pretty uh simple prank.
Now, you do have to get somebody to undo the bungee cord, which eventually a staff member or someone either had these students or they did themselves undo the bungee cord. The student's free, he's fine. But don't bungee cord your friends. and don't jam your friends belongings into the porta potty It's bad news, if you've ever dropped something into the porta potty tank, you know it's gone. Like what are you gonna do? Get down in there and retrieve it? Not likely, not likely.
This has been another Hunter's Anecdotes to keep you afloats. And we're at the end of our episode. Thank you so much for joining us here in Privycast. We love having you. As always, if you would like to connect with us on social media, we're at all the social medias, thingies, at privycast, or you can send us an email, feedback, all those type things, privycast at gmail.com. Share the show, tell a friend, word of mouth is wonders. It does great and it would be super appreciated.
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and his music is licensed under copyright 4.0 Creative Commons, of course. Thanks, Kevin. We'd also like to thank Pottington Bear for the use of all the colors in the world as the Hunter's Anecdotes intro and outro music. You can find Pottington Bear's music at pottingtombear.com. Thanks, Pottington. This has been another episode of Privy. Thank you for joining us. And now, as always, from the best Western. Don't forget to flush.