March 29, 2024

The fun of public restrooms

All of us are human. All of us need to eat food on a regular basis and, all of us have to use public restrooms. I don’t understand public restrooms. Everything is automatic. From the moment of walking into a public restroom, having the lights turn on which I admit is nice, sensors picking up each and every movement. 

It is always a question in my mind when I walk in a public restroom whether or not the toilet is automatic. If the toilet is not automatic,flush the toilet manually. But, if the toilet is automatic, it flushes when it “feels” necessary. If you are like me, you wait until the toilet flushes before leaving the stall, but you are waiting there, for what feels like ages, until the toilet finally flushes. 

Now… I understand how nice it is to not have to touch the toilet, and if you don’t get frustrated about automatic toilets, good for you. But washing hands with an automatic sink requires patience. I have places to be. I don’t have time to wave my arms for three years hoping the sink will turn on. Trying to wash hands with an automatic sink is the same as trying to say hi to a friend, but they are zoned out. Hello?… hello in there. Is anybody home? With my arms waving in front of them. When there is no answer we move on to the next sink, and go through the same process. 

At this point the sign hanging in the bathroom, “Employees must wash hands before returning to work” is starting to become quite worrisome because if I can’t wash my hands, how can the employees? 

Once you get the sink to work or if you can get the sink to start working it’s a race to the soap and back again, because the sink is only running for 10 seconds before it starts daydreaming again. And, the process of waking up the sink is in progress once again. Moving from one sink to the other. 

I do have to admit that the new automatic soap dispensers I’ve started seeing in restrooms are handy and useful.

After washing hands, it is time to dry off all the water. There are two options: automatic paper towels or automatic blow dryer. So, you begin waving to the paper towels and given only enough paper towels to dry one fingernail. It takes about three-paper towels to dry off all the water. The blow dryer has to finish what the paper towels didn’t accomplish.

It seems that most of our automatic machines are in the bathroom. Why? When we could be studying better and easier ways to cook or eliminate traffic. It seems like we have perfected the bathroom. Now… we need to worry about our eating habits. What we are eating and if we are cooking or eating out.