This copy is for your personal non-commercial use only. To order presentation-ready copies of Toronto Star content for distribution to colleagues, clients or customers, or inquire about permissions/licensing, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com

It’s time for a portable toilet to get off the pot and disappear from Fenn Avenue, where it has outlived its usefulness.

Wherever there’s construction, you’ll find a porta-potty to provide workers with a place to do their business, even if the seat is ice-cold in winter and splattered with stuff that nobody should sit on.

Hospitality is a low priority — they can be gruesome if not regularly pumped out and cleaned — but the alternative is worse. Any construction worker will tell you they are valued, if not embraced.

They remind me of my childhood in Jarvis Ont., a town of 960 people near the Lake Erie shoreline, where water and sewer mains weren’t installed until the mid-60s.

Until then, many homes had an outhouse in the back yard, some of which were still used even after the pipes went in and highfalutin’ indoor plumbing was installed.

My grandparents’ home in nearby Waterford had one long after they put in a bathroom; grandma regularly banished grandpa to it after he’d been drinking, which was pretty much every day.

One of the highlights of Halloween night was forays into darkened yards by mischievous teens, who delighted in tipping them over. It was even more fun if someone happened to be on the throne.

But the lowly outhouse is strictly temporary in the modern age, unless it sits for so long that it becomes part of the local landscape, as is the case with a toilet at the northwest corner of Fenn Avenue and York Mills Road.

Yarmila Filey copied me an email that she sent to her city councillor, where she said “sorry to bug,” noting that the outhouse “has been there more than long enough, and hopefully the (construction) teams are not coming back any time soon.”

In another note, Filey said she got her hopes up when she saw “a flat-bed truck parked on Fenn, right alongside the porta-potty. It had three potties on board and I saw a couple of fellows out there.

“As I went up the front steps I looked back and saw the guys get back into the cab of the truck and they left the potty. Wonder why they did not take this eyesore away when there was a lot of room on the truck.”

STATUS: I reported it to the city and got the following reply: “City staff investigated and will make contact with the company that owns the portable toilet and arrange to have it removed from the public right of way as soon as possible. Residents who observe privately owned equipment that may have been left in the public right of way can contact 311 and file a service request for city staff to respond.”

Anyone can read Conversations, but to contribute, you should be registered Torstar account holder. If you do not yet have a Torstar account, you can create one now (it is free)

Copyright owned or licensed by Toronto Star Newspapers Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or distribution of this content is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Toronto Star Newspapers Limited and/or its licensors. To order copies of Toronto Star articles, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com