LOS ANGELES — The other day I finally broke down and joined the
Information Revolution, circa 1987: I bought a paper-shredder.
There is just no other way to process the barrage of credit card
offers, subscription trials and obscure Internet scams, all of
which seem to include precisely enough sensitive information about
my financial privates to enable your average dumpster diver to buy
a mid-sized Cayman Island.
Meanwhile, as the Paperless Office I’ve been hearing about for
decades utterly fails to materialize in my pulp-cluttered writing
room, technology has leapfrogged in the one area where it couldn’t
be less welcome: the Paperless Bathroom.
The men out there, especially, know what I’m talking about:
scalding automatic hand-dryers that start and stop at random,
sensory activated faucets that only dispense water once you’ve
thrust both elbows in the sink, hopped on one foot and chanted
“Bloody Mary” three times — and not a single humble paper towel in
sight.
Did the guy before you spill water all over the counter, leaving
no place to set down your newspaper? Tough! Want to wash your hands
quickly, without standing like a demented supplicant to the Alien
Faucet God? Stop urinating!
This is a tyranny we have let tread on us for far too long, and
it’s created a tangible health hazard, too. That pimply-faced teen
at Del Taco has a hard enough time getting your drive-thru order
within the same food group. Think he can divine the mysteries of
21st century hand-washing?
The automation grows more rapacious by the day. Besides
robot-operated water and heat, we are now subject to the
condescending cruelty of automatic flushing. Was our manual track
record really so poor?
I’ve studied this trend for several years now, and I can confirm
that at least one out of every four sensory-triggered
urinal-flushers in America suffers from a kind of aquatic
Tourette’s Syndrome, sending cascades of water both downward and
outward at intervals that CalTech’s finest couldn’t predict. Woe to
the end-user standing prone in front of a gusher; it can take hours
to remove the phony appearance of incontinence, and that’s one hell
of an awkward position to assume in front of a wall-mounted blow
drier.
The EZ Flush system has also migrated to the stalls, and for
reasons utterly beyond my grasp, these seem to be most frequently
situated in supposed classier washroom environments. In January, I
found myself in a four-star InterContinental Hotel where not only
did the automatic stall-flush fail to perform its critical
function, the automatic lights failed as well, thereby throwing the
entire room into a blackout at the worst possible moment.
I realize this is not a particularly pleasant subject to read
about with your morning coffee and bagel, but that’s precisely the
kind of shame-faced Protestant silence that the Robot Toilet Mafia
has relied upon while foisting their terrible utopia upon the rest
of us.
Who are these wet-sink profiteers, these nanny-bathroom
n’er-do-wells? Companies like the Mundelein, Illinois-based
Technical
Concepts, proselytizers of the “touch-free” bathroom. “The
increasingly germ-conscious public wants touch-free devices that
promote better hygiene and sanitation,” Technical Concepts CEO
George Patrick Murphy wrote in a press release last year.
He continued: “Automatic soap dispensing systems provides
just the right amount of soap for an efficacious washing.
AutoFlush products and AutoClean systems for toilets and urinals
reduce maintenance costs by preventing stains and damage
from uric acid and calcium deposits. Everyone benefits from these
and other features, from facility owners to building service
contractors to consuming customers using the restrooms” (emphases
added).
See what the canny CEO is up to? He’s tempting hoteliers and
other porcelain gatekeepers with promises of low maintenance costs,
while depending on us “consuming customers” to continue accepting
our humiliation in silence. At this rate we’ll be finger-printed
and optical-scanned before entering any restroom, and perhaps even
instructed on whether we can go number 1 or 2, by the end of the
decade.
That’s why we need to start fighting back now, to take our great
country’s bathrooms back from the evil profiteering robot aliens.
Next time you’re in an automated InterContinental restroom, don’t
let the “touch-free” zealots get you down. Walk to front desk, ask
for the manager, and demand to pee “with dignity,” or else.
