Toilet Wars

By Cindy    
Years ago I worked as a writer for a quality consultant firm that was world-famous for leading businesses to do things right the first time. As the mother of five young children, ranging in age from 11 to three-year-old twins,  I realized I could use the quality management principles about which I wrote every day to create some calm out of chaos in my family life - most especially the toilet wars.
     Once my three oldest children got over the thrill, during toilet-training, of waving bye-bye to their  you-know-what, they lost interest in the toilet. Not the twins (nicknamed Chip and Dale for their adorable household antics). One of their favorite activities was locking themselves in the hall bathroom and seeing how many "toilet toys" they could flush down before water seeped into the living room and Mom screamed. Their record flush included a padlock, a pair of dice, a little metal truck, a rubber ducky and - the children's favorite since the plumber had to melt it down with a flaming acetylene torch before he could remove it - a rat-tailed comb.

                     

   Once the plumber was at my house (and I know the neighbors thought we were having an affair) to remove a baseball from the sewer line. "No charge," he said, smiling tightly. "I'm sure I'll be back soon."
      So I thought about the quality management principles of my employer. The point is preventing - rather than responding to - problems. Everyone in an organization has to participate in order to make it work.
    I studied the principles of quality management:

1) Quality is defined as conformance to requirements, not as goodness. So I could define the requirements clearly for what I wanted to have happen - or not happen - around the house, and make sure we all understood them the same way. Sure, that seemed possible...

2) The system for causing quality is prevention, not appraisal. Ok, I could certainly find a way to prevent undesirable things from happening - after all, they were only three years old...

3) The performance standard is zero defects, not "that's close enough" - touche! How many times had I told someone to clean out the hamster cage and later sighed, "Yes, honey, that's good enough" as I stood knee-deep in reeking cedar chips?

4) The measurement of quality is the price of nonconformance, not indices. Well that was easy - we didn't even know what an index was. But I knew that nonconformance meant what it costs in time or money - or aggravation - to do over something that was done wrong.

   Yes, I thought with a quiver of excitement: We can do this!
   And we did, after a fashion.
   We understood (some of us more clearly than others) the benefits of a smooth-running household and discussed the ways we could make this happen. The people who emptied hamster cages learned how to do the job efficiently and correctly (take the cage OUTSIDE by the trash cans).
   And yes, the toilet wars became history. We locked the bathroom doors, using a hair clip to pick the lock as necessary. Chip and Dale used the bathroom only when accompanied by a key-carrying member of the family. I was aware that I might be planting the seeds of aberrant behavior later in life, but it was worth it not to see the tide rising in the living room.

   And Chip and Dale understood clearly that if they regressed to flushing anything but their you-know-what again, they wouldn't get to go to the park that day. My employer's quality management system didn't teach punishment, but I was a despotic chief executive officer.

  All work is a process, and so is all family life. The quest for quality in either arena is never over, and neither are the successes we celebrate along the way.  
   Years ago, I hoped that the long-range payoff for applying these business principles to our family life would be someday turning loose five people who could step confidently into the world and manage their own adult lives for quality.
   And has that happened? Yes it has. Each of them is a warm, wonderful, successful adult and - perhaps most importantly - can go to the bathroom by themselves.