2008 Woodie Awards
The hokey pokey and the art of activation no-touch hand dryers
Kristina Reardon '08
Issue date: 9/28/06 Section: Portfolio
There I was, waving my hands in front of me in circles, doing some kind of hackneyed line dance, or else waving frantically at the wall, hoping it would wave back.
That, of course, was not what I was trying to do, but rather what those who passed me must have thought I was doing. Let me clarify: I was attempting to coax air out of one of those no-touch hand dryers in a public restroom, trying to activate the supposed sensor that resides inside.
What fascinates me about public restrooms is the method in which you are expected to dry your hands after having washed them. In a valiant attempt to save our planet, restroom designers have, in recent years, installed hand dryers in many public restrooms, replacing the paper towel dispensers of old.
In my youth, such dryers required you to press a large metal button, resulting in the free flow of air on freshly washed hands.
Nowadays, those nice metal buttons are a thing of the past. This is due to the fact that a large faction of germ-o-phobes approached an equally large faction of environmentalists at some grand convention five years ago (a convention which none of the rest of us were invited to), and argued for days about the value of paper towels versus hand dryers. The result was a great compromise on the scale of the Geneva Convention. Now, when you walk into a bathroom, you shockingly find that there are no more metal buttons on hand dryers. That is, unless you are using a public restroom which still uses paper towels (the horror!) or one which has not yet decided to exchange the metal button dryers for metal button-less dryers.
There was one problem at the great "get-rid-of-paper-towels" convention: The germ-o-phobes forgot to demand that the dryers actually turn on when one waves one's hands in front of them. My guess is that the environmentalists thought it would make for a good time if they installed little cameras in the dryers instead of sensors, and the result is that some tree hugging group is now watching me frantically wagging my arms, with a befuddled expression on my face, at their latest convention.
That, of course, was not what I was trying to do, but rather what those who passed me must have thought I was doing. Let me clarify: I was attempting to coax air out of one of those no-touch hand dryers in a public restroom, trying to activate the supposed sensor that resides inside.
What fascinates me about public restrooms is the method in which you are expected to dry your hands after having washed them. In a valiant attempt to save our planet, restroom designers have, in recent years, installed hand dryers in many public restrooms, replacing the paper towel dispensers of old.
In my youth, such dryers required you to press a large metal button, resulting in the free flow of air on freshly washed hands.
Nowadays, those nice metal buttons are a thing of the past. This is due to the fact that a large faction of germ-o-phobes approached an equally large faction of environmentalists at some grand convention five years ago (a convention which none of the rest of us were invited to), and argued for days about the value of paper towels versus hand dryers. The result was a great compromise on the scale of the Geneva Convention. Now, when you walk into a bathroom, you shockingly find that there are no more metal buttons on hand dryers. That is, unless you are using a public restroom which still uses paper towels (the horror!) or one which has not yet decided to exchange the metal button dryers for metal button-less dryers.
There was one problem at the great "get-rid-of-paper-towels" convention: The germ-o-phobes forgot to demand that the dryers actually turn on when one waves one's hands in front of them. My guess is that the environmentalists thought it would make for a good time if they installed little cameras in the dryers instead of sensors, and the result is that some tree hugging group is now watching me frantically wagging my arms, with a befuddled expression on my face, at their latest convention.