I must drink a lot of tea, because I have visited a ton of public restrooms in my day. I do what needs to be done, wash my hands, and then hopefully dry my hands on something other than my shirt or pants. There’s a plethora of options these days for hand drying. My favorite is the old, grab-as-many-paper-towels-as-you-want method. I know this is wasteful, but it also gets my hands the driest in the shortest amount of time. Now they have these electronic, motion-detector paper towel dispensers. The other day I walked into a Meijer restroom, and the motion detectors must not have been set properly. I walked past 4 or 5 of these machines and set them all off – whirl, whoosh, whirl, whoosh, whirl. It felt like the time I had a hole in my muffler in sunny California where almost everyone has a car alarm. I drove through one neighborhood and left a horn-honking storm in my wake! This particular time I had paper shooting out of every towel dispenser.
Recently I was in one bathroom that had one of those motion-detector paper towel dispensers. As I approached it, the machine let out about 4 inches of paper towel. Uh, right!! Maybe that could dry a baby’s hand … but not mine! So I proceeded to wave my hand under the dryer to get some more drying substance. Nothing happened. I read the directions on the machine (yes, they were right there). “Place hand under here.” I did. Nothing happened. By now my daughter was beside me with her dripping hands. She tried it. Nothing. We kept looking for the proper way to get more paper towel. At one point we were both bent at the waist, leaning way over looking at the underside of the paper towel dispenser. We couldn’t find anything that would detect motion. I started thinking we were probably looking quite silly. I whipped up suddenly and looked around – this was a perfect time for the Candid Camera people to pop out. Alas, no one came forward. We ended up leaving with wet hand marks on our jeans.
To save on paper costs (and probably janitorial costs), many establishments have gone to the hand blowers. Long time ago, it took more than one press of the button to dry my hands. (Was that common for everyone or do I just have big hands?) Most of the button-push hand blowers have gone out of style. Now we find them in the motion-detector section too. The ones that intrigue me the most (and are my favorite) are the ones that sound like airplane engines and can actually blow the skin on your hand from one place to another. I met a friend recently at one of those hand dryers. She said, “Look, if we can put our faces under here, we could get face lifts!” I laughed and said that we would have to carry the dryer around where ever we went to keep the face lift.
Earlier this summer, I was in a gas station restroom. I was drying my hands under one of those airplane engines that was attached to the wall right next to the exit. The door opened and a woman with her granddaughter stood there and just looked at me. I motioned them to come in – I wasn’t THAT much in the way of the door. She shook her head, and I stopped drying my hands. This is when she started her lecture from her position outside the bathroom with the door still in her hand. I can’t remember everything she said, but she went on and on about the evils of these hand blowers. She exclaimed (with unbelief that I didn’t know this) that these hand blowers are horrible. She told me about all the diseases in the bathroom that these monsters blew around in the area surrounding us. I was stunned – more that she would come at me with this than what she was actually saying. She might be right. I don’t know. To be honest, there are too many things to worry about in my life than whether a germ from the floor gets blown up my nose.
What caught me as funny, though, was when she started to list the diseases that I could catch by using this hand dryer. The list went on (forever it seemed) and finally ended with “Typhoid and AIDS.” Really?? Yep, that’s what I said. That isn’t what I wanted to say. (I was being good.) Here’s what I really wanted to do and say: I wanted to look at her, look around the room, and take a deep breath to take in all of the germs that were obviously flying around the room! I wanted to look at her and say, “Girlfriend, if AIDS is airborne, we are ALL in trouble!” I wanted to peer around the room and duck for any invisible dirty needles that might be flying around in the airplane engine’s after effects. (I’m so bad.) But all I said was “Really?” and I backed away from the door. The lady walked in, but her granddaughter was too scared to follow (poor girl). The grandmother turned around and told the little girl, “It’s okay, you can come in now.” Meanwhile, I am thinking, “Uh, the germs are still flying around.” I guess if the machine stops blowing, all of the germs she talked about suddenly drop to the floor. OH, so THAT’S why we don’t go barefoot in bathrooms!!
I walked out of the restroom and chuckled to myself. What I truly wanted to do was to turn around, whip into the bathroom, and put my hands under that dryer while the two of them were locked up in their stall with no place to run! Thank you, Lord, for giving me some restraint! When I hopped into the car, I shared the incident with my children. Since then, anytime we come out of a bathroom with one of those hand blowers, we warn each other that we have now been infected with typhoid and AIDS! I do not mean to make light of these serious diseases at all. But, if you have a phobia of hand blowers and germs, please do not accost the customer using one. We just want to dry our hands!
