LUV & HAT

LUV - You’re right to be suspicious of the electric toothbrush. After the superintelligent robots have risen up to enslave mankind, the remaining pockets of humanity will be able to trace the genesis of the uprising back to the electric toothbrush. Without too much fuss, you see, the electric toothbrush has already made you its bitch.

Time was when you could adequately clean your teeth by jabbing a stick of plastic into your gob and jiggling it around for a while. But those days are long gone. Now there are machines that do it for you - machines with heads that oscillate faster than the human hand ever could. And as these machines grow more complex, their utter contempt for you grows exponentially. 

Soon the electric toothbrush wouldn’t just clean your teeth - it would tell you how long to clean your teeth for. You turned it on, and you were locked into the teeth-cleaning process for two whole minutes. Sure, you could take it out whenever you wanted and let it see out the two minutes on the side of the basin, but the toothbrush knew. It always knew. 

Then, when the toothbrushes discovered that even this was too complicated for humans to grasp, they split the time into four 30-second chunks. You put the toothbrush into your mouth and cleaned the front of your top teeth. After 30 seconds the brush pulsed, and you moved onto the back of your top teeth, then 30 seconds later it pulsed again and you moved on to your bottom teeth. The message was clear. The machines were eroding your free will. Soon you would be nothing more than their mindless drone.

The toothbrush I own now has the 30-second pulse feature AND it has a light on it. Press the toothbrush too hard into your mouth and it lights up. “YOU IDIOT” it implies, “YOU CAN’T EVEN BRUSH YOUR TEETH PROPERLY. YOU DON’T DESERVE TO LIVE.” My sense of self-worth is in the toilet thanks to this technological advance, but at least my teeth are cleaner than ever.

Who knows what the next generation of electric toothbrush will be like. Perhaps it’ll have a little arm on it that gives you a cigarette burn whenever you don’t get close enough to your gum. Or maybe it’ll be able to stand over you as you sleep, stroking your face and muttering menacingly about all the terrible things it’ll do if you don’t brush precisely how it wants you to. Maybe it’ll be able to send a robot back in time to kill your mother before she gives birth to you as revenge for your inability to clean your teeth to an acceptable level.

The moral of this story, then, is that toothbrushes hate people and I hate people, which therefore means that I love toothbrushes.
- Stuart Heritage

HAT - I don’t eat battery-operated bars of chocolate and I don’t use mouthwash you have to plug into the mains. I just refuse. And for the same reason, I don’t have an electric toothbrush.

If God had intended us to fill our gobs with electricity-powered bitsnbobs he would have a) made electricity something that just was, not something we could only discover after millions of years of dicking about in the dark, and b) made, I dunno, oranges light up on trees when they were ripe, or something.

I didn’t get where I am today by risking tongue and tooth on a daily basis, mixing a lethal AAA charge with my saliva. I got here by working hard and not putting electrics in any of my orifii.

Anyway, isn’t there something satisfying about that elbow grease you have to employ in order to shift grub out from between your molars? You have a good old brushaway and it feels like you’ve really earned that zingy, pristine sensation. It’s even better if you don’t brush for, say, a fortnight beforehand. Then you really feel the benefit.

Plus, these robot toothbrushes have puny little heads that can only do one tooth at a time. My Wisdom S-GLX has a head of bristles the size and strength of a warehouse broom, and after a few violent thrusts of my arm I’m left with no noticeable detritus and that satisfying taste of fresh gum blood that lets you know you’ve done the job right.

Then, of course, there’s the possibility that, as a leccybrush addict, you suddenly find yourself in a situation where you haven’t been able to bring your automated mouth hygeine implement with you.

Say you “go back to someone’s place” unexpectedly. You wake up in a furry-tongued panic, race to the corner shop to get an old-fashioned toothbrush, return to your companion’s abode, lock yourself in the bathroom - and your arm is so limp from years of relying on dear old Autobrush that all you can do is flail helplessly at your mouth, knocking the plastic handle uselessly against your dribbling lips. No morning funzies for you, sunshine.
- Stuart Waterman