And the world record for most time in a tub goes to… me!

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 11/11/2020 (2161 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

I don’t wish to complain, but I found myself in a rather awkward position the other morning.

I was lying on my back, reading the newspaper, when, suddenly and without warning, my cellphone began to chirp.

Reaching over to the small shelf beside me, I quickly scooped up the phone and blurted: “Good Morning!”

The voice on the other end of the line belonged to my editor, who was calling to have a in-depth discussion about professional journalism.

We chatted for a few seconds until, after a pregnant pause, my editor asked the following hard-hitting question in a mildly concerned voice: “You’re in the bathtub right now, aren’t you?”

What with being a crusading newspaper columnist, I thought briefly about lying, as people automatically do when they refuse to admit they were sleeping if a caller wakes them up in the middle of the night.

You will be proud to learn I opted for the truth. “Yes, I’m in the tub!” I grunted, before quickly adding: “How did you know?”

Which is when my editor laughed and replied: “I could tell by the way your voice was echoing off the bathroom tiles.”

Busted! So we laughed and then I made some lame joke about how, if you added up all the time I’ve spent floating in the tub, I’d probably qualify for a world record.

After hanging up, however, I began taking the matter more seriously. I mean, how hard could it be to calculate the amount of time I have spent immersed in hot water, which is the way I have started every morning for at least the last 30 years?

As regular readers already know, every morning for the past three decades, I have engaged in the following ritual — crawl out of bed, crawl to the front door to get the newspaper, crawl down the hall to the main bathroom, fill the tub with excruciatingly hot water, then climb in, stretch out and read the newspaper.

When I started writing this column about 14 years ago, I called Statistics Canada on a whim and asked one of their experts whether they keep data on the average time a typical Canadian spends floating in their bathtub. Our heart-felt conversation went something like this:

Me: “Hi, can you tell me how much time the average Canadian spends each day in the bath?”

StatsCan: “NO! Why exactly do you want to know?”

Me: “Ha ha ha! Never mind.”

For the record, I have just calculated that, over the last 30 years, wherein I have had at least one bath every day — and sometimes two — I have spent an estimated 16,425 hours floating in scalding water while reading the paper or a book or randomly Googling stuff on my smartphone.

Is that a world record of some sort? Well, I personally don’t have a clue because I have just spent roughly an hour searching various websites online and, as far as I can tell, no one has established a formal record for relaxing in the tub.

That is more than a little surprising, because you can find world records for almost any idiotic activity you can think of. For instance, I just learned the record for the world’s longest shower is held by Kevin “Catfish” McCarthy, who was pelted by drops of warm water for 340 hours and 40 minutes, completing the task on April 12, 1985, at Buffalo State College, in New York state, where apparently everyone has way too much time on their hands.

According to the folks at Guinness World Records, the record for the most people showering simultaneously is 396, which was achieved on June 15, 2018, by a group known as “Irish Spring” at the Firefly Music Festival in Dover, Del.

Another bit of useless tub trivia I stumbled upon was that, according to the folks at Guinness, the fastest bathtub in the world was created in 2015 by Swiss engineer and race driver Hannes Roth, who achieved a maximum speed of 189.9 km/h after attaching a tub to a go-kart chassis and installing a four-cylinder Yamaha R6 engine with dual exhaust pipes sticking out the back of the tub.

As far as actually spending a long stretch of time in the tub, the only useful tidbit I uncovered was the fact that for 100 hours — from Sept. 11-15, 1986 — Barry “Captain Beany” Kirk of Port Talbot, West Glamorgan, in the U.K. sat in a hotel bathtub filled with cold baked beans in a marathon event dubbed “the Beanathon.”

I personally would not be willing to challenge him for the bean-sitting title on the grounds that (a) I cannot afford to buy that many cans of beans; and (b) my dogs already stare at me with laser-like intensity when I get in a normal tub, so I can’t imagine how out of control they would become if I was soaking in a huge vat of delicious pork and beans.

Speaking of dogs and tubs, the most hounds bathed in a single hour was 118 by volunteers called “The Barking Lot” at a fundraising event on Aug. 4, 2012, in El Cajon, Calif.

So for the moment, at least until I hear otherwise from the people at Guinness, I am going to stake my claim to the unofficial world record for wasting more time floating in the bath than any other allegedly sane journalist on the planet.

I may even try to add a few subcategories — such as world’s longest bubble bath — because when you’re a champion, it’s important to keep adding new wrinkles.

doug.speirs@freepress.mb.ca