They’re men on a mission.
Day after day, Jack York and Brian Krueger are rolling across America in their Gripemobile 423Z with two toilet seats mounted on the front, taking to the trenches in search of answers to one burning question: “What bugs you most about the opposite sex?”
And boy, are they getting an earful. Men never put the toilet seat down when they’re finished. Women talk too much. Guys don’t do their fair share of household chores. Gals overanalyze a man’s every utterance. His idea of a warm and fuzzy Valentine’s Day gift is a pair of handcuffs and a can of whipped cream. She’s too picky about presents. He leaves toenail clippings on the nightstand. She prefers chocolate sundaes to sex.
There’s more, of course. Much, much more.
In city after city, the dedicated duo sets up shop in malls and other high-traffic areas and takes to the street with video camera and tape recorder in their quest for complaints. They’ll be soliciting gripes from noon to 1:30 p.m. Friday at Water Tower Place.
In the past two months, more than 7,500 people in 25 cities have stopped to sound off about the opposite sex. There’s something about York and Krueger that just seems to draw a crowd.
Maybe it’s their eye-catching Gripemobile, which started life as a used 1982 Chevy van but now bears the bold legend, “The Great American Complainathon Rolls Across America!”
Maybe it’s the fact that Krueger and York are sporting T-shirts and caps reading “Beyond Putting the Toilet Seat Down,” which happens to be the title of their recently self-published book from Armchair Press.
Maybe it’s because they’re sitting on a toilet in front of the van.
“I guess you could say the toilet is sort of our trademark,” says York, a 33-year-old Cincinnati real estate consultant who likes to dabble in offbeat entrepreneurial projects. “People come right over and ask, `What’s this all about?’ Plus you can sit on it when you get tired.”
Besides, powder-room peeves figure prominently in “Beyond Putting the Toilet Seat Down,” York and Krueger’s surprisingly successful (more than 65,000 copies sold so far) paperback featuring 423 candid comments and complaints from men and women about the opposite sex. Among them: “I hate it when my boyfriend goes to the bathroom and dribbles pee down the front of the toilet onto the floor.” “He blows his nose on my clean bath towels and puts them back in the middle of the stack.” “Why can’t women put a new roll of toilet paper on after they use the last of it?”
“You’d better have two bathrooms if you expect to have harmony at home,” concludes Krueger, a 35-year-old Cincinnati artist and advertising executive who shares York’s penchant for wacky promotions. (The longtime friends last teamed up to peddle Penalty Pal, a yellow flag for football fans to wave at games to indicate displeasure with a referee’s call.)
Find acceptable faults
But bathroom quirks are just the beginning of what drives women crazy about men and vice versa.
“The list of complaints is absolutely endless,” York exults.
The two cheerfully acknowledge they have hit the road to promote their book and collect quotes for a sequel due next spring. But they insist that they’re also trying to send a serious message to anyone who’s involved in a relationship or is still searching for that “perfect” partner.
“There’s too much psychobabble about relationships out there and too many self-indulgent, overanalytical books written by Ph.D.s about normal relationships,” York declares. “We’re the voice of the common man and woman. We’re trying to spread the word that you’re never going to find that `perfect’ person. Everyone’s got problems.”
Krueger agrees. “We don’t pretend to be experts, but we’re really getting a good spin on relationships,” he says. “You’ve got to work at them.”
As York tells it, the idea for the project grew out of a dinner party discussion two years ago.
“It was right before I got married to my wife, Gina, and a bunch of couples were pontificating about relationships,” he says. “One young lady made the comment that there was no `perfect’ relationship and that the key to happiness was finding someone whose faults you could live with. That was the original inspiration.”
York and Krueger decided it would be fun to publish a book of complaints about relationships and the opposite sex. When they could come up with only about 40 gripes from personal experience, Krueger’s girlfriend, Cyd, suggested soliciting quotes from farther afield.
“We came up with a one-page questionnaire and sent it to our friends and relatives all around the country,” York says. “Then we started driving around the Midwest on weekends, distributing the questionnaires at bars and shopping malls. About 3,500 people filled them out and sent them back, and we used the best comments in the book.”
The No. 1 problem
Although the complaint about some males’ seeming inability to put the toilet seat down crops up frequently, York and Krueger have discovered that the biggest problem between men and women involves the sexes’ differing communication styles.
“It’s a cliche, but it’s true,” Krueger says. “Men’s big complaint about women is that they talk too much. Women seem to just like the act of conversing. When my girlfriend tells me about her day, it takes her practically as long as the day took. You wouldn’t believe the way she goes into detail.
“Men go for the Cliffs Notes version of communication. For example, we asked a man in Pittsburgh what bothered him most about women, and he said, `Time of month.’ We said, `What do you do about it?’ He said, `Leave.’ Men and women communicate differently, and it leads to frustration on both sides.”
Women might mind men’s lack of loquaciousness less if the guys pulled their weight more on the home front.
“Women’s No. 1 complaint about men is that they don’t keep up their end of the bargain at home,” York says. “He works and she works, but when they come home from their jobs at the end of the day, she does the housework while he lies on the couch. We hear that all the time.”
Let’s get more personal. What kind of problems do York and Krueger have in their own romantic relationships?
“Actually, Gina and I have the opposite problems from what a lot of people have,” says York, who says he always puts toilet seats down. “I tend to talk a hole in a brick wall and communicate in detail about everything. She’s very reserved.
“Also, I’m extremely neat and she’s not, and I have to reorganize the refrigerator every time she goes shopping,” York adds plaintively. “She complains that I won’t let her throw garbage in the trash cans because I want them to be clean, but I hate dirty, messy, germy stuff. I don’t want an old banana rotting on the kitchen floor, or the bathroom looking unpresentable, so I’m always cleaning and making sure everything is nice.”
Krueger, on the other hand, describes himself as “a professional slob,” a trait that has not endeared him to his girlfriend or his Gripemobile traveling companion. But then, he isn’t crazy about York’s snoring, which sometimes gets so loud that Krueger abandons their hotel room and sleeps in the Gripemobile.
The two started out sleeping in the Gripemobile to save money, but they have taken to splurging for hotel rooms more often in the wake of an episode at a Phoenix truck stop.
“We stopped the Gripemobile at the truck stop about 2 a.m. and were laying out our futons when a guy came running out of a convenience store with a gun in his hand shooting at another guy, and we were afraid we were going to get caught in the cross-fire,” York says. “I said, `That’s it, we’re leaving.’ I don’t like staying at truck stops anyway. The bathrooms often are dirty.”
`Some light in the darkness’
Still, despite the hardships of the road, Krueger and York valiantly soldier on in the name of better relationships between the sexes.
“It’s great seeing America and finding out what people are thinking,” says Krueger, who is optimistic about the future of male-female liaisons.
“I think males, especially the ones in the twentysomething generation, are becoming much more sensitized to what is going through women’s minds,” he explains. “We’re starting to see some light in the darkness.”
“What we really are seeking is wisdom from people who are in good relationships,” York says.
“People do all kinds of research before they buy a car and spend all kinds of time taking care of it,” he adds. “Why don’t they put that kind of time into working on their relationships? The more you give, the more you’ll get back.”
