Hand Dryers in Public Washrooms

Public washrooms are a really good place to do some serious people watching eh? Like . . . let me rephrase that okay! What I mean to say is that whenever I go into a public washroom I notice things that just make me want to take out my camera and start taking pictures . . . er, uh . . . this is not going well, let me start again . . .

. . . You have to wonder about the provisions included and designs of public toilets. Like in North America you have toilets complete with urinals . . . (I don’t think women’s washrooms provide these, although I remember a FOREIGNER record album cover one time that . . . never mind) anyway, complete with urinals and/or stalls with sit-down toilets, toilet paper (in most cases), sinks with water and soap, paper towel dispensers (often actually equipped with paper towels) and/or electric hand dryers. In Japan you get all of that and a small bag of chips. There, you may also get the choice of a squat toilet but more importantly you get the heated toilet seat which is the reason I no longer stand to pee. It has nothing to do with my relationship preferences or anything like that. I mean, I love sitting on a toilet seat that doesn’t cause me to choke from the rapid reflex inhalation associated with glacier-chilled toilet seats. The Japanese toilets are also equipped with bidets. I had never seen a bidet before. Before travelling to Japan, I had never seen a control console on a toilet before, and I certainly did not know what all of the buttons on the control console were for (the instructions were written in Japanese and I did not understand a single word of it.) Anyway, after diverting the small flood in my toilet stall from the geyser shooting out of the toilet bowl (which, by the way was aimed directly at my crotch), I realized that the button I had pressed on the console was not the control for toilet-flushing. It is always slightly disconcerting to emerge from a public toilet with water marks in the crotch area, knowing you will have to convince everyone else in your travelling party that something other than wetting yourself has just occurred. Japanese toilets are generally clean and tidy and equipped with all the paper and soap products necessary for that pleasant and comfortable lavatory experience. Toilets in many parts of China, on the other hand, seem to lack the public bathroom pleasures that I have grown accustomed to during my 60 odd years on the planet. The first public washroom I visited in China had a galvanized steel trough into which I guessed that I was supposed to urinate (no worries, because I was quite used to cowboy bars in Plentywood, Montana). The only difference is that in Plentywood, Montana these troughs are ONLY used for urination! There were no sinks in this bathroom either and subsequently no soap or towels or hand dryers. Why would there be? Hell, there wasn’t even any toilet paper. By Cambodian standards though, Chinese public washrooms are 5-star and by Indian standards, Cambodian public lavatories are like stepping into a neuro-surgical operating room at John’s Hopkins hospital. There is definitely a continuum of public washroom standards as you move from place to place around the world.

For instance, did you ever really think about those hand dryers they put up in public bathrooms pretty much everywhere around the planet. In North America, at least, you get the choice between the skin-sensitive paper towel and the electric hand dryer. There may even be a sign posted between the paper towel dispenser and the electric hand dryer stating: “we suggest the use of our state-of-the-art hand drying system effectively positioned and strategically located to help reduce the wasteful use of the world’s forests and also the ramped spread of bacterial diseases propagated by paper towel lint.” Yeh, whatever, like the 4000-gigawatt hand dryers, which cause power outages in small nearby villages when they start up, are going to save the planet. Right. One of the items I use in my scale of rating public washrooms, is actually the type of hand dryer that is installed near the exit door of the washroom. I will sometimes use simply the sound the dryer creates when it starts up. In large washrooms like the kind you find in modern airport terminals, there are no doors so when the dryer goes into use you can actually hear it from outside the lavatory. The weaker ones, of course, are barely audible and raise no suspicions. The more powerful ones sound like Waikiki surf and will often create a draft that may deftly suck a small child from the arms of an unsuspecting mother passing by the entrance. You can also tell how effectively your hands will be dried by the name and logo printed on the hand dryer. Seeing dryer names like “Ocean Breeze” or “Meadow Wind” usually means that the last step in the hand drying process will be wiping them on your shirt or trousers. I love seeing hand dryers with label names like “Atomic Blast” or “Tornado” or “ExCelerator” or my favourite of all-time – “Terminator” (complete with warning labels against use by children under 12). That one had like a height measurement bar beside it –“you must be this tall to use this hand dryer” and Freddy Kreuger was the guy in the poster pointing his finger at the top of the bar. In China I can’t read the labels on the machines, of course, because they are all written in characters but most of the time there won’t be one. You can sort of tell when it is a powerful machine though, because you see decaying body parts that have been blown off and stuck to the walls beside.

In general, paper towel dispensers are usually designed to save paper as well; being the good global-friendly people we are in North America. Unfortunately, it takes so long to figure out how to get the paper out of the device that your hands have dried on their own in the mean time. In fact, the excess body heat produced from the fit of rage one goes through to get one measly piece of towel usually over-dries your hands so that you ultimately need lotion or something. There are some paper towel dispensers in public toilets which indicate the need to use both hands when removing a paper towel from the machine (complete with pictorial instructions). I often rebel and just use one hand (that is in my nature you understand). I do check for toilet police first though!! Usually the size of the wipe you get from these machines is too small for the use of two hands anyway.

I don’t usually frequent women’s washrooms so I don’t know all the little things that happen in there, but there is one strange behavior that happens in the men’s loos that immediately indicates the age of the fellow about to use the toilet. The proximity to the bathroom entrance and the time after entering at which the unzipping of “the Fly”, and the undoing of belts and buttons in preparation for “the act” occurs, is indirectly proportional to the age of the patron. For example, I have seen small children standing at urinals peeing their pants with their fly still fully zipped. On the other end of the spectrum, I have seen 70-year-old men with their belts undone and zippers at one quarter mast before fully crossing the threshold of the washroom. I once spotted a ninety-year-old grandfather with his pants around his ankles being dragged onward by a 4-year-old still ten meters from the washroom door.

Which just goes to show you – It’s always something. If it’s not one thing it’s another. If it’s not the hand dryers in a public toilet taking the flesh off of your hands, then it’s your fly getting stuck as you enter the loo. Any way you look at it, there’s always lots to laugh about in a public washroom, although I would suggest that you save your laughter until you are no longer IN the washroom. Some people are kind of sensitive about that sort of thing.