Automatic Hand Dryers
One of the things on this earth that I hate the most are automatic hand
dryers. That’s right. Those machines mounted on the walls of public
restrooms that are supposedly for the convenience of restroom users in
the simple task of drying their hands. (So there’s nothing poetic about
the title of this entry - I’m actually going to talk about automatic
hand dryers)
My reason is simple - I can never get them to work quite right.
The
general idea for operation of these things is that one is supposed to
position his or her hands underneath the vent where all the hot drying
air will come out. Underneath that vent is a sensor that will
"automatically" sense your hand hence "automatically" turning the
machine on. Simple right? Wrong! Damn wrong.
First of all, it’s
not that easy to get the thing to actually turn on. Apparently, in
Japan, China, Korea or wherever the hell they make these things,
"automatic" means a 15-30 second interval wherein the user is expected
to randomly move his or her arms in the attempt to make the "automatic"
machine to work. Hell, that’s what I end up doing. And when I say
random movement, I don’t mean slight and graceful arm movements. It’s
not as if i’m doing ballet. Think a cross between the "butterfly dance"
and baseball signals.
And of course getting it to turn on is
just half the battle. There’s the challenge of getting it to work long
enough to actually dry your hands. You’d think that all the work you
put into getting the thing to work (15-30 second ritual as explained, supra),
you’d at least get the same amount of time of hot air to let your hands
to dry. Ha! Fat chance! The gods of automatic hand dryers are cruel
dieties. You’ll get 3-5 seconds - and that’s if you’re lucky.
And
to add insult to injury, when you’re finally done drying you’re hands,
mostly from the random arm movements more than the hot "automatic" air,
suddenly the damn thing starts to work as it was supposed to when you
first started using it. Cruel. Malicious. Malevolent.
It didn’t
used to be like this. Back in the good old days of hand dryers, when
"automatic" was a term only used for Technogas stoves, one need only
press a shiny silver button for the hand dryer to work. This magic
button gave the user a solid 15-30 seconds, depending on the model, of
hot air just enough to dry one’s hands. And the beautiful thing about
this classic hand dryers is that if your hands weren’t dry by the time
the hot air shut off, hell, you could press the button again and get
the same steady stream of sweet hot air. Those days are gone. These
classics are, sadly, only installed today in old dark crumbling office
buildings in restrooms filled with stagnant water.
Now is the era of the automatic hand dryer. And how I hate it.
