It's not quite a rhetorical question, but I paused before I answered: "This will give you an idea: I've been looking at toilets for the last hour and a half."
Backstory: I was preparing a lesson on using dynamic blocks in AutoCAD modeled after an online tutorial which used toilets. (Dynamic blocks can be thought of as a stack of objects with only the top object being visible.)
The tutorial used several types of toilets which the narrator implied were available, but the installation of AutoCAD I used had one suitable toilet block. To get more, I downloaded a ZIP file of toilet drawings from Kohler.
To make the lesson easier for the class I looked for toilets with shapes different enough to be easily distinguishable. This probably will not come as a surprise to anyone who's renovated a bathroom, but aside from color, a lot of toilets look very much alike. so as I was plowing through hundreds of drawings it struck me that I must be looking at a duplicate. Sure enough the drawing I just looked like looked like another one I'd seen about a minute before. I did an A-B comparison to see if there was a difference. Here's the video:
I imagine that someone needed the larger/smaller bolt holes to accommodate the demands of feng shui. ("Oh no! It's all wrong! The smaller holes will ruin everything for the toilets pointing north.) What may be more depressing is that there must be people whose job depends on not only knowing the difference between models of toilets, but remembering the tagline for each. Of course there must be toilets which "reflect your good taste", but are there toilets which make a bathroom happier or more inviting?
