It would seem that, having given up on the idea of the paperless office, the company I work at is trying out the paperless bathroom instead. Err, I mean for drying your hands – if they took the actual toilet paper away I think they’d face immediate petitions, strike action, and maybe a riot or two thrown in the good measure.
The substitute is the hand drier, normally unused by 90% of the toilet-using population. Usually the only people who bother with it are those who are so fussy about getting every last droplet of H2O off their hands that they use the paper and the drier, or those who are so fed up with seeing the huge pile of ex-tree that has developed in the bin by late afternoon that they decide to make a futile gesture for the environment and not use the paper towel.
But now, we’re all using it, whether we like it or not. And so we’re all discovering where exactly to put your hands so that the sensor realises you exist and turns the hot air on. And how to get them actually dry, you have to shake your hands out thoroughly, and make sure you rub them together under the drier like some kind of evil plotting baddy in a cheap suspense film.
Splish splosh splash. Shake shake shake. Rub rub rub Muuuhahahahahahahaaaa!
It’s not the end of the world. We’ll all survive. And in the extra time it takes to dry hands with the drier, we can try and answer the following question: Why is it that hand-dryers in bathrooms always have the brand name and company phone number, and sometimes even a sales pitch on them? Like you’re going to look at it and think "yeah, I could do with one of these for home", and go and ring them up?
