::A Geek in Korea::

Back when my wife and I were pondering our choices for Christmas presents, we vowed we’d get a bidet. The only thing stopping us was that there was no plug in our bathroom of any kind. We have electric lights, of course, but there is no plug in our either of our bathrooms for some baffling reason. We have to run a long wire to our bedroom in our guest bathroom so that we can have hot showers at the moment since the hot water is being tied into the city’s water at the moment at the neighborhood block level.

We had someone we knew lined up to install the electrical plug into our bathroom. The man was all set to install our stuff months ago, but his father had a stroke and he took off time from work to care for him. We didn’t want to call someone else to install our plug, so we went without our Christmas present until the middle of June. My wife gave a follow up call to see if he was back at work, and he said he had forgotten about us in all the drama going on with his personal life. Totally understandable.

He came today while I was at work to install the electrical plug. He ran it from one light switch, through a wall, up into the ceiling then down through a light, then through another wall and ceiling fixture, down, around a wallk, through a cabinet, and out the other side to where the toilet is. It’s basically a ridiculously complex electrical grid hack! He said that the people that did the electrical work for the apartment should have put all of this in originally so he wouldn’t have had to snake it through the ceiling. He had to do all of that because he couldn’t do the proper tile work. Knocking out a wall and replacing it seemlessly is a lot harder than what he did in an afternoon, and a lot more expensive too. He made it as safe as possible, with very little wiring out in the open, unlike our insane temporary water heater.

Now we’ve got out plug, so we can start pricing bidet features. My foreign coworker said that I was weird for wanting a bidet. “Will it shoot hot water on your butt?” was his first question.

“The models I’ve seen in Korea probably shoot rainbows up your butt. They’ve got enough buttons to do that. I want one with all the bells and whistles.”

While he thought my enthusiasm for a bidet was strange, he admitted it was a nice luxury. After his long stay in Japan that he came to love heated toilet seats, and highly recommended that feature. He said going back to the cold seats when he visited the United States was always a hard thing to adjust to.

That honestly never was on the list of things we thought to look for, but it is now.