Joe Harker
A woman has come to the terrible realisation that she's been using public toilets wrong pretty much all her life after talking with a friend.
While politeness prevents us from dwelling too much on what people get up to in the privacy of a toilet cubicle, this particular error concerns cleaning up after oneself when one's business has concluded.
Don't worry, we're not about to tell you she never realised you could flush a toilet or anything, it's not quite that bad.
No, instead she explained to Reddit that she had a germaphobe (that's fear of germs) mother who dreaded having to touch the flush in a public toilet, and so always flushed by kicking the lever with her foot.
Advert
Mother taught daughter this same method and daughter grew up thinking this was just how everyone did it, because who on earth ever wonders if they're flushing a toilet properly?
This continued for 18 years thinking the way her mother taught her 'how things were done' was how everyone did it, and only recently realised her mistake.
For some reason she'd been talking with a friend about flushing a toilet at their school and her friend brought up that she'd touched the flush lever with her hands.
The woman's life was about to change forever as she asked her friend why anyone would ever put their hands on the lever to flush a loo, only to be told that it was the way pretty much everybody did it.
She was left 'completely flabbergasted' and admitted that now she's haunted by all the times she kicked innocent toilets assuming that everybody did that.
Needless to say this is the kind of story the internet absolutely loves and plenty of people piled in with jokes.
One said they 'use the last of my stream to force the handle down', while another wanted to know what the protocol was for toilets with button flushes rather than levers.
A third wondered 'do people in this thread not wash their hands after going to the bathroom or what', while a fourth suggested their own method of coating their hand in toilet paper to pull the lever.
Someone else who had cleaned toilets in a school urged people 'don't kick the handle' as it just made things worse and often broke the loo, giving someone else a tougher job to fix it.
Quite a few others said they actually did this themselves to avoid touching the particularly grotty toilets with their hands.
Another admitted they would use their foot to activate the flush 'depending how bad the restroom is'.
It seems the woman is not quite as alone as she feared, though that might be a damning indictment of the cleanliness of public toilets.