Ordinary Nothing

The things are starting to become more and more popular in public toilets here as well, but we’re not even close to what I saw in my US trip. During the entire three weeks of the trip, there were maybe only two places where the public restrooms included water taps with a handle that needed operating by hand, for example.

Practically every single device had those motion detectors, IR sensors, or whatever. You put your hand near the tap, water flows, you take it away and the water stops. You put your hand under the air drier and hot air blows, you take it away, and it stops. Or at least, that’s the theory.

One problem I always have with those devices is that a large percentage of them tend to ignore my existence. I’m not very vain, but if I actually put my hand in front of a sensor whose sole purpose is to detect hands, I fully expect that sensor to notice that it’s there. And often enough, they don’t. Requires a whole procedure of moving closer and further from the sensor, changing angles, trying movements in different speeds, and sometimes just leaving and going elsewhere. All things that would not have been required if I had something to push, rotate, pull, or otherwise operate using physical contact.

But it some restrooms in the US I encountered a different range of problems. This was with automatic toilets. Ones which are supposed to automatically detect when you’re leaving, and then flush by themselves. And no, I’m not talking about urinals, I’m talking about full fledged toilets. Which are much more complicated, since they should be able to notice when you leave the cell/room, and not just the immediate vicinity. Otherwise they may flush when you’re still there, and haven’t finished.

As happened to me more than once. Including a couple that flushed a few times while I was still sitting on them. Darn, that gave me a start the first time it happened. You want to flush when I’m standing in front of you, even though I’m not done yet, that’s fine. Annoying and stupid, but fine. But flushing while someone is still sitting there, that’s just mean.

And then there were those few places, only two of them I think, that took automation to a new level. There are two common methods for hand drying in those places, either hot air blowers, or paper dispensers (and those few rotating towel roll things, but there aren’t a lot of them, and they’re semantically like the paper except they get washed instead of thrown). Automatic air blowers are common even here, in addition to those that operate when you press a button.

But paper dispensers, the ones I saw, are always always manual. You have to grab a piece of paper and pull. If it’s a paper roll, you pull until you have enough and then you tear it. Simple enough really.

Those two places, they had automatic paper dispensers. I was stunned. I reached with my hand to grab the paper and pull, when all of a sudden the roll starts to rotate automatically and the paper slides out. I grabbed the paper, tore a piece, and as soon as my hand was away it stopped going out.

That’s so pointless that I’m speechless (apart from the small matter of me having all this to say about it, of course). You still have to grab the paper by hand, and to manually tear it on the serrated edge of the dispenser. So why spew out the paper automatically? What does it save? What’s the benefit? What problem is it supposed to solve?

October 16th, 2005 at 2:41 EET | Categories: Trips | Track comments. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.