Home again, and the tyranny of robot bathrooms

I arrived back home in Finland today after about a month or so of

travelling. The travelling was approximately half for work and half

for pleasure. Both sides of that went quite well and on the whole I'm

feeling good about life, but it sure is good to be home again. Expect

my frequency of phlogging to gradually increase and the delay in my

replying to emails to gradually decrease as I get back into my online

groove. Apologies to those of you who have been suffering the most

from my reduced responsiveness.

A quick rant which I suspect might be well-received in gopherspace:

Over the past month a much higher proportion than usual of my trips to

the bathroom have taken place on planes or in airports, on trains or

in train stations, in petrol stations, restaurants and other

not-remotely-homely locations. As a result, I'm well and truly sick

and tired of robot bathrooms, where it seems like just about anything

which can be automated will be automated, although very rarely well.

Sometimes this extends even to flushing the toilet when you stand up,

but the most common targets are getting soap onto your hands, getting

water running over your hands and then drying them.

It's not uncommon for this entire three-part process to rely on

various sensors for turning things on and off. It's very common for

at least one stage in the process to either not work at all, or to

work very poorly indeed: say, the water or the hot air comes on when

you put your hands in the right place but if you move your hands by

more than an inch or so it cuts out, so if you want to actually wash

or dry your hands enough to make a difference you get this irritating

lowfrequency pulse-width modulation system happening. Or maybe the

sensor turns the water on, but it gets switched off after

approximately one quarter of the amount of time it takes to properly

wash your hands. It hasn't happened to me yet, but I live in fear of

the inevitable day that I get a nice big blob of soap

precision-delivered to my open palm and then find that none of the

taps will turn on at all, and there's no paper towel to wipe it off

with, just automatic hand driers...

Given that this stuff often works so badly, and/or breaks down much

more often than "old fashioned" bathrooms (you know, the kind we all

survive perfectly well using at home), one has to wonder why we so

routinely bother with the extra expense and environmental impact.

Many people will mention, no doubt, that it's more hygenic to use

sensors so people aren't all touching the same germy surfaces.

There's something to this, I'm sure, but it doesn't apply to soap

dispensers (which you only touch immediately prior to washing your

hands with soapy water), and I think that in approximately half of

robot bathroom encounters, the first thing you do after washing your

hands is to touch a germy door handle on the way out, which seems

rather to defeat the point. It feels, like so many things, like

technology for the sake of technology, with only quite flimsy

arguments in its favour. The few times I encountered a fully manual

bathroom in my travels, I honestly found it a small relief.