Observational Comedy - Gallons to Liters Conversion

Observational comedy is a form of humor where the storyteller turns aspects of everyday life into comedy. Normally, the joke starts with "have you ever noticed" or "did you ever wonder why" and this is the premise of this post.

Please note that I don't have an agenda, other than a comedic one,  and I can't help it when I need to write about some sort of everyday mundane aspect of my life. Also, this post appears to deal with males and for this reason I will satisfy only about 50% of the population. Keep reading.

Writing this post is difficult because of the subject matter. I edited this post several times and I hope it doesn't turn you off while reading it, not to mention the difficulty I had taking the two pictures being used in this post, man it was very tricky. I waited several minutes before taking the pictures to make sure I was alone and it felt very strange, actually it felt like stealing. It would be terrible if someone saw me using my cellphone and taking these pictures. Oh my! Keep reading.

So, here are the two infamous pictures that I took. Yes, here they are, two pictures of a urinal from a public bathroom.

What made me look at this, I still don't know. But as I was standing there using this fixture, I could not help myself as my eyes were drawn to the upper left corner of the fixture. First is the name of the manufacturer, American Standard and that's fine and dandy. Under the company name, it states "3.8 Lpf / 1.0 gpf".

Lpf stands for "Liters per flush" and "gpf" stands for gallons per flush.





Using the unit conversion site from Google after entering 3.8 Liters it returns 1.00385 Gallons. Using the standard significant figure rule for rounding numbers, the 1.00385 becomes 1.0.

So, the math works.

There is an error, though, with the units. The "gpf" should be "Gpf". I know, I know, a mere trifle.

The BIG question, though, is why do they feel so compelled to post it on the fixture! WHY????? It drives me crazy!

Perhaps, high school students can benefit from this. While the male students take a Physics test where they have to convert Gallons to Liters of Liters to Gallons, they can ask to go to the bathroom, see the conversion and answer the question on the test.

I am trying to picture the conversation between two Yiddish-speaking employees at the American Standard headquarters, Schlemiel and Schlimazel.

Schlemiel: Let's just have the company name on top of the fixture, Reb Schlimazel, what do you think?

Schlimazel: Feh! Too bissel, Reb Schlemiel.

Schlemiel: Stop kvetshing, Reb Schlemiel. What else can we do?

Schlimazel: You're gonna plotz, Reb Schlemiel, if you hear my idea.

Schlemiel: Oy! I'm full of shpilkes!

Well, our imaginary friends Schlemiel and Schlimazel came up with this cockamamie idea of showing the amount of water being flushed in two units, Gallons and Liters.

I've contacted American Standard and as soon as I hear from them I will let you know.