Flush technology

Don’t let anyone tell you words don’t have power. When my husband and I shopped for toilets recently, I could not stop giggling at the language used for selling what we all want most from a toilet: to hide the evidence. More than that, our trip to Home Depot showed me that having a gift with words doesn’t always mean writing novels. You can name paint chips. You can classify laminate flooring.

You can market toilets.

The Optum™ VorMax™ box needs to be read in a booming, between-plays hockey arena voice, with flashing disco lights.

VorMax™ flushing system delivers a POWERFUL stream of water that SCOURS the ENTIRE bowl.

That’s a potent sentence, even without the hockey voice. It conjures images of a high-velocity, unstoppable vortex of clean, clear water extracting everything in its path, like a movie whirlpool that’s so powerful it sucks ships to the bottom of the sea.

I puzzled a bit over the “dirt” word choice for the CleanCurve™ Rim, though. Do people usually have dirt in their toilet bowls? Perhaps that was just thrown in to draw attention away from the more graphic word in the sentence: “buildup.”

The marketing on this one makes me want to buy the toilet just to try to flush golf balls. It also made me laugh at the cleverness of conveying “ewww” invormation in such a sterile way. Look how white! Look how clean! Look at the sparkle in the “Fight stains with Everclean®” image! Even though it’s not golf balls you’ll be flushing, your toilet can look like this, too.

The next one is my very favorite, though.

This toilet is going to work hard for you. You’re going to open up the tank and it’s going to be like a train locomotive, with pistons pumping, and water sucking, and the toilet bowl flushing with such force it might pull tissues out of the box and down into the vortex if you’re not careful.

I can’t remember which toilet we ultimately ended up buying, but I had a lot of fun shopping for it.

I sure would love to see all the jokes the marketing teams wrote when describing the glories of their toilets.