City Mysteries of Seattle: Portable Sanitation Edition
posted by on August 27 at 10:55 AM
They baffled and entranced me upon my arrival in Seattle in 1991, and continue to do so to this day: Honey Buckets, the Northwest’s #1 provider of portable sanitation, whose portable sanitation units are called, upsettingly and inexplicably, Honey Buckets.
The mystery of the Honey Bucket is reinvigorated each time I have out-of-town visitors, who invariably can’t believe their eyes. Among the evergreen exclamations: “I thought you were kidding!”; “That’s the actual name?”; “Holy shit!”
The great unanswered questions roiling under every exclamation: Who thought naming a line of portable toilets ‘Honey Buckets’ was a good idea, and why? After ‘Honey Bucket,’ what were the runner-up name choices? And what part of human waste is even vaguely reminiscent of honey?
Imaginary answers to these imaginary questions aren’t pretty. My best guess at the origin of the name is horrible, positing humans as “Pooh Bears” who are eternally attracted to the “Honey Bucket.” My best guess for the rejected runner-up name is “Stink Office.” I have no guesses about the human waste/honey connection.
One can only imagine that someone considered “Honey Bucket” a pleasant euphemism for “plastic crap shack.” But the whole point of euphemism is to diminish unpleasantness (i.e. “passed away” for “dropped dead”) and the Honey Bucket “euphemism” only serves to rub our faces in the sticky-sweet brownness of it all.
No matter what kind of unpleasantness occurs along the way, the whole “explaining Honey Buckets to out-of-town visitors” experience always ends in amazement, when I reveal that Honey Bucket has a competitor in the local waste-disposal business, and this competitor has an even more upsetting name. I’m not kidding.
Check yo' spelling of reminiscent.
Aww, adorable!
The origin/explanation of the name comes from "honey dipping", the process of cleaning out a toilet/outhouse or other unpleasant task.
The Hobo slang dictionary says:
honey dipping - working as a shovel stiff in a sewer, or any unpleasant shovel work.
I remember the term from when I was in the Boy Scouts.
those are TOILETS??!??!?!? i've been getting my honey out of them for years!!!!! this expains why i hate honey.
My grandfather, who was born in 1890 and lived without indoor plumbing for most of his life, used the term honey bucket like I would use outhouse or chamber pot. Maybe it's an old-time or regional phrase?
you silly goats - honey buckets are so nicknamed from Japan where they are the large wooden bucks full of shit and piss carried to the fiends to be used to fertilize the crops
kinda cute -and so Strange that with the interest about body functions at certain places - oh, well ... maybe farmers are not so dumb as calcified city folk
great nickname - very international
Which came first, Honey Bucket or Honey Hole.
I want a BBQ brisket sandwich now.
Oh god. "Ooze" is such a terrible, gooey word anyway, and now... I can't even find the words to illustrate my discomfort.
Here's an interesting discussion of other words that conjour up the "ick" factor from Language Log (for linguistics geeks)http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/004835.html#more.
BTW, my family referred to the tanker truck that annually pumped out the outhouse in our mountain cabin as the "Honey Hauler."
Inspired by the Melvins' song, perhaps?
I was recently informed that under certain conditions Honey Buckets can explode - potentially damaging nearby Honey Buckets, cars, and who knows what else.
Can a Public Intern get to the bottom of this?
There's a Port-a-Shitter company from Central WA that has this tagline on all of their shitters: "#1 in the #2 Business." If that isn't class, I don't know what is.
It seems like that entire industry has a pretty good sense of humor, and I salute them for it!
"Honey bucket" has been around forever. Airline employees call the big machine that sucks out the chemical shitters on planes that. As Oldguy and Winna point out, it's much older than that, too. Our great-grandparents knew what irony was too, you know.
Back in the '70's, a port-a-can company named itself "Here's Johnny!," hitching their presumably witty, urbane crappers' star to Ed McMahon's famous nightly intro of Johnny Carson. Mr. Carson was neither amused nor as anxious to hook up. The shitter co. was forced cease and desist.
When I was a teenage in the 80's, we used to steal and...errrr... repurpose... the stickers off those things. The humorless Port-a-San here in Northern California just don't cut it.
i went on outward bound through the great smoky mountains in NC when i was 13. for much of the trip, we were hiking through pristine forest where we could leave absolutely no waste behind. we hauled around a five-gallon plastic bucket that we crapped in. it was called "the honey bucket."
OTOH, this is an area where technology has greatly advanced. Forty years ago, outhouses all smelled horrible. They smelled like, well, of course they smelled like shit. These new fangled things are, if adequately serviced, at worst bearable. So I salute the Honey Bucket ooze things.
Or my gag reflex has matured and I'm too old to smell stuff.
I was recently at a super nice wedding, and the honeybuckets on site were upscale 'VIP models, complete w/ carpeted floor, glass mirror, vanity-style sink/counter.
I felt like I was at the W downtown. Until I remembered how disgusting carpet is EVEN WHEN NOT IN A PUBLIC AND PORTABLE TOILET.
Holy fuck.
In Minnesota (as in many other states), commercial trucks have to have their GVWR (gross vehicle weight rating) posted on the side. I once saw a sewage truck there with the marking, '20,000 pounds of VERY GROSS weight.'
I also did the Outward Bound course in the Great Smokey Mountains and had the 5 gallon variety of Honey Bucket. I wondered why something so foul would have such a sweet name and was told that's where the Pooh goes, as in Winnie the Pooh.
@15: Now that you're grown up, you can buy the stickers. Or hats or mugs. Check it out on honeybucket.com.
In Maine and New Hampshire, the industry leader seems to be The Blow Brothers.
Ooh! Ooh! I know! They should get a celebrity endorsement from Larry Craig!!
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