DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

When I travel, I resist all conscious temptations to touch anything, especially my face. I don’t mean to sound all Howard Hughes, but I do think it’s possible to contract some bad afflictions in public areas, which are basically swimming in other people’s DNA. Judging from my experience of fellow travelers, I could contract grime, body odor, halitosis, poor fashion sense, or an accent.

So I’ve been amused and, as is more frequently the case, irritated by worldwide efforts over the past few years to fully automate public restrooms. For example, many airport sinks can sense when hands are beneath the faucet. The idea of this is brilliant — because if there’s one spot of concentrated filth in a restroom, it’s the faucet handle, as that’s the last thing everyone touches when their hands are dirty. These are so coated with noxious bacteria that there’s just no point washing your hands if you’re going to turn the water back off afterwards.

(Handy travel-safety tip: don’t touch the door handle either.)

The problem with the auto-faucet idea, as you have no doubt experienced, as that is is implemented poorly in almost all cases. Or am I the only person who invariably gets a sink that turns the water on and off randomly, or not at all, no matter how much I’m waving my hands and poking at sensors? Honestly, some of the sensors I’ve encountered are triggered by only one action: moving to the next sink in line.

Besides the auto-faucet, I’ve seen the toilets that flush automatically, and at totally random times, like when I walk past a row of them and they all flush in turn. I’ve seen the hot-air hand dryers that turn on and off automatically. What I like best about these is that they’ve allowed the dryer vendors to finally move to iconographic directions, a real improvement given that every single set of English-language dryer instructions on the planet had been defaced in exactly the same way (“1. Press butt. 2. Rub hands under arm.” etc.).

I’ve seen lights connected to motion sensors (which discourages loitering in the stall, I can tell you). And I’ve seen the latest innovation, the toilet that changes its own seat cover, although I think there may really only be two seatcovers in that machine, and they just switch back and forth. You can try this yourself — trigger the switch seven or eight times. I’ll bet you each one looks exactly the same! You’ve been warned.