HOW blue is your loo

By Les Young

If your household is similar to ours, you are absolutely fed up with exchanging good quality, hard-earned money for fourth-rate products on the supermarkets, butchers and greengrocer shelves. Apples that taste as you’ve bitten into a bag of flour, oranges that have no juice but high prices, corned beef that is only half the size when cooked because it had been pumped full of brine (brine that you paid $20 plus per kilo for). What about the potato crisps in the new packaging that has 10% less crisps and 15% more cost? The list of profiteering and ripping us off is almost endless but we are not here to make up lists we are here to fight back, and my fight back is centred on Toilet Blue. Let me explain how I got from over-pumped corned beef, dry oranges and floury apples to new improved toilet blue. Early this year my wife arrived home from her thrice weekly coffee & cake session with her girlfriends (which occurs after each Gym class) and reviewed the day's coffee & cake conversation. One member of the group complained about the new and improved toilet blue which seems to last 3 to 4 days when placed in the cistern compared to the original outdated model which lasted approximately 3 weeks. A member said her daughter had a very expensive plumber’s invoice to pay because one of her young children had dislodged part of the “in bowl” toilet blue unit and the part completely blocked the toilet. I’m a retired Fitter & Machinist who spends 3 to 4 days a week in the workshop building working steam engines, boilers, pumps and a myriad of things that friends and family need. By midday, on the following day, I had a dispenser/mixer designed, trialled, modified and working using a toilet blue cube purchased at the local supermarket at a cost of $6.00 for 2 cubes. The dispenser/mixer will never wear out, rot or rust; it will last forever.

WITH 2 OF US IN THE HOUSEHOLD THE SINGLE TOILET BLUE CUBE LASTED

8 WEEKS!!

The dispenser/mixer in our second toilet, used by family and friends, has lasted 15 weeks and still going blue.

The cheaper version of toilet blue cubes costing approximately $1.80 for 2 cubes was trialled and lasted almost as long as the more expensive product with the main difference being that the blue colour is a little paler. The choice comes down to paying $3.00 for 8 weeks for a blue toilet or $0.90 for 6 weeks depending of course on the number of people using the toilet. We’ve gone for the $3.00 product to get a nicer shade of blue.

Family and friends including staff of the Bribie Islander & Surrounds Magazine wanted to try out the little dispenser/mixer and have achieved similar results as we did. Maybe I should start selling them. We are the product of our environment, my environment was engineering, and yours may be office work, building, nursing, retail, education, journalism or like my beloved Mum, homemaker. We all think differently with varied knowledge, skills and experience and we can all see different opportunities for improvement. We just need to identify an opportunity for improvement, visualise what it should be like, and work out how to make the change. I can only imagine the difference we could make using our combined knowledge, skills and experience against the profiteers.