My Treatise on Public Restrooms

I have noticed that there are all sorts of automatic devices/ choices in public bathrooms.   Some have automatic soap dispensers.

  Some have automatic paper towel dispensers.  There are blow dryers for your hands, both the kind that have a start button and the ones you wave your hand under to make it blow. 

 Then there are the faucets that respond, in theory, to your hand being held in the right place.  And then there are the toilets.  There are the automatic ones that flush if you so much as shift your weight.  The ones that have no visible button; handle or other way to make the water go down.   Some faucets have a timer sort of thing that allows the water to run for about ten seconds before shutting off.   It’s impossible to get your hands wet enough to wash them.  Then it is almost impossible to rinse.

I am not sure I have ever been in a bathroom that has all of the automatic devices in it.  I hate having to wave my hand around trying to find the sweet spot that gives me running water.   My hands must not be the right temperature or size or something. 

Once my hands have somehow gotten washed and rinsed, I have to wave and pass my hand under the paper towel holder, just to have a square inch of paper come out after the machine has said “bzzzz”.  There is never, ever enough to get my hands dry!  So I walk away and try to trick the dispenser, make it think I am someone else begging for paper.  Bah.

Of course, the blowers make a whole lot of noise and don’t make my hands any drier than when I started.   So, after waving my hands in a conniption of trying to get dry, I wipe my hands on my pants and walk out of the bathroom with wet hands and wet streaks on my pants.

I was having “tummy troubles” the other day and spent longer than usual in the stall.  Every time I moved at all, the toilet flushed and I got a nice spray of toilet water.  

I was in a public restroom in a service station the other day.  It was a large room with a partition, one mind you, between the toilet and the sink.  And next to the toilet was a chair.  Not sure what that was all about.   But, this weird bathroom was totally non automated.  I flushed the toilet myself, when I was ready.  I turned on the water and left it on long enough to wash and rinse.  And I even got to pull out enough paper from the dispenser to dry my hands!

Oh well, there’s no place like home.   Where there are rarely surprises in the bathroom!