Automation is supposed to help make our lives easier, right? Automatic doors save us the hassle of having to actually extend our arms two feet to open the door ourselves, cars that can automatically parallel park themselves are a godsend to those of us who are woefully parking challenged, and automatic toothpaste dispensers always supply the perfect amount of paste thereby saving their owners a couple, nay, dozens of cents. But I have come to the conclusion that automation just does not belong in public restrooms.
It was while at the movies with my brother that I came to this conclusion. As we were settling in to watch Hugo, which I will shamelessly plug here as a fantastic movie that everybody should go to see, I came to that awful realization that always seems to come at the most inconvenient of times: my bladder was quite uncomfortably full and needed immediate relief. So, I begrudgingly got up, leaving behind my $5.50 tub of popcorn that I knew my brother would immediately pounce upon and gorge himself with. In any other circumstance I would have taken it with me, but you can’t eat food once it’s been in the bathroom. In your mind, even if not in reality, it becomes tainted by tiny pits of fecal matter that you just know fill the bathroom air.
Once I had emptied my bladder and I had pulled my pants back up, I turned around only to realize that I had just urinated into a toilet that was supposed to have automatically flushed. The only problem was that it had not flushed when I had stood up. Well, I wasn’t just going to leave a toilet bowl full of my bodily fluids behind for anybody to see. The products of urination and defecation are a private matter between a girl and her toilet. Nobody else has the right to infringe on that privacy except, of course, for plumbers and the various creatures that live in the sewers, such as the teenage mutant ninja turtles.
Knowing I had to make the toilet flush somehow, I began to frantically wave my hands in front of the sensor. So there I was, in the movie theater at nine thirty at night, in a public bathroom stall, flailing my arms above a bowl full of my own urine hoping that somehow this would make the urine go away. Automation has become a part of our civilized culture, and yet that description sounds far from civilized. In fact, it sounds like some sort of deranged rain dance wherein the objective is to actually make the rain go away and the rain is actually your own pee.
Needless to say, I was eventually successful and happily exited the stall knowing I would be the only one to have viewed my expelled bodily fluids. But then another very similar problem arose, only this time it was in the form of the paper towel dispenser. Admittedly, I wanted to get back for the previews so I washed my hands a bit hastily and they were still dripping with a few soap suds as a reached for the paper towels. But I was not going to return to that theater with wet hands. I always get grossed out when other people come back from the bathroom with wet hands. That wetness could just as likely be pee as it could be water, and it might not even be clean water at that.
But no towels came out when I waved my hand in front of this new sensor. So I basically repeated exactly what I had done in the stall: I frantically waved my hands about hoping that somehow this would solve my problem. At this point, I was beginning to feel like a little organ grinder’s monkey dancing around for pennies. Twice within two minutes I had been reduced to spazzing out like that one special kid in elementary school did whenever he forgot to take his meds. And I had done this only for the most basic of things; to get the toilet to flush and to be given a ten inch piece of tissue paper to dry my wet hands.
Now, had the rewards for looking like an idiot been greater, I would not complain. If that toilet had flushed away my quirkily debilitating social awkwardness and if the dispenser had been shooting out hundred dollar bills, then I would have been all for the frantic flailing of arms. Hell, I would have done cartwheels if those were the rewards. But they were not, and if anybody else had been in that bathroom with me, I would have looked like an even bigger moron than my normal outward appearance would usually lead one to believe.
I’m not saying that I’m entirely against having things automated. Sometimes automation can be quite useful. All I’m saying is it would be nice if those automated things actually worked. That would save some of us from getting uncomfortable stares when we come out of the bathroom stall after having just been overheard screaming at the toilet for its stupidity.
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