This has had me wondering for some time but male bathroom protocol prevents me from addressing the issue directly. Asking questions is verboten.
Why do some men while standing at the urinal, presumably urinating, flush the thing before finishing? This seems a great way to get ones pants and yourself wet from the spraying water.
Is this a culturaly indoctrinated behaviour?
Is it a time saving measure?
Is it because of stage fright and the flushing noise is a trigger to release?
Someone please settle this for me once and for all. I need to get my head out of the toilet.
But I will fancy your third guess as close. The sound of flowing water tends to help many men (people?) to go. Maybe it relaxes us, I couldn’t find a site that wasn’t adult rated (here’s a tip: don’t search for anything with the word “peeing” in it, ugh :eek: I should have known better)
And to think I could cut two nanoseconds off of my next bathroom break by flushing early. :smack:
I always assumed it was one of those things that somebody did once on a whim and other people went, “hey, that’s cool.” Sheer immitation ingrained into habit.
Never seemed to serve any real purpose other than to be different.
The sound of the flush masks the sound of your stream of urine splashing in the water. Not that I’m embarassed by the sound, but that I don’t think everyone else in the room wants me to share it with them. So I flush midway through.
The sound of the flush covers up the sound of the urine stream.
Or at the end if you got a case of the tinkle, silence. tinkle, tinkle. silence… silence… tinkle
a good flush is all you need
to cover up your noisy deed
I don’t know when I last saw a urinal that you can or need to manually flush. They all just flush automatically on a cycle. In our toilets at work there is even a time release air freshener which can be disconcerting if it happens as you start to pee, it takes a moment to work out why your urine has a floral bouquet today.
It’s a game. You have to beat the flush. You have to stop as close as possible to the end of the flush without going over. If you gotta flush twice, you lose. I started a thread about toilet games once. Urinals are too fast though, to play you need a nice old fashion toilet.
I grew up in a house whose toilet needed jiggling sometimes to reseat the thingamabob sealing the water inside the tank while it refills, so I got into the practice young, to save myself a minute of hanging-around time.
But it sounds like a male multi-tasking thing to me too, a kind of “Let’s see if I can do THIS and THIS and --THIS! all at the same time, with no loss of quality.” My whole life consists of stuff like that. When I get up the morning, first thing, my challenge is to make coffee, get dressed, and boot up the laptop to the SDMB simultaneously, all of which have various waiting stages, in which I scurry to accomplish a part of the other two tasks.
Then I drink the coffee and read the SD, paying zero attention to the time. I mean, it’s not like I was really challenged to beat 3 minutes to have coffee, get dress and boot up–it’s just fun that way.
I was just thinking the same thing. Some of the electro-flush toilets I’ve seen even do a mini-flush about 10 seconds after you take your position (presumably for the people who want or need the sound), and they do a full flush when you walk away.
It wasn’t a part of my potty training, and I don’t do it. However, I think some boy children are taught that way. I’ve even heard a couple of comedians joke on it. “…and God forbid I should outlast the flush and somebody will hear that sound!”