THE Examiner certainly gets some daft surveys from organisations – usually PR companies desperate for some newspaper coverage.

But this one has to be the oddest of them all and, even more bizarre, it came from the AA’s Home Emergency Response Service.

Their probing, hard-hitting survey reveals that 16 and 17-year-olds spend 43% longer on the loo each day than their elders because more than half the time they spend there is wasted on activities such as texting, using social networking sites or playing smartphone games. By the way, the actual time the teens are there equates to 22 minutes and 29 seconds.

And 55% of this age group sends or reads texts on the loo compared to just 9% of those aged 18 or above.

Perhaps the answer’s as simple as this. They have more spare time than the rest of us.

Unless I’m missing something how this fits in with home emergencies is something of a puzzle. If a teenager saw a leaking pipe they’d probably think that was normal.

Even more baffling is how the AA got teenagers to talk – about anything, let alone their toilet habits.

Surely you’d expect more parents with young children to spend longer on the loo – just to grab those few minutes of relative peace even though the little darlings are probably outside hammering on the door and yelling ‘can I have a drink’ or the usual fall-back question ‘what you’re doing?’

It seems the AA were at something of a loo…se end with this one.