Those automated restrooms
Nowadays nearly every large rest stop and every restaurant, every airport and every theater, features automated bathrooms. It’s all very magical—or at least it seems so, at first.
The toilet is timed to flush right after you finish what you’re in there for. The sink turns on as soon as you put your hands under the faucet. And the towel dispenser gives forth its bounty at the mere wave of a hand in front of its magic sweet spot.
Except that my influence on all these brilliant inventions is to make them go haywire. I enter the stall, and the toilet greets my arrival with a preliminary flush to clear its already-clean palate. I approach the toilet, and it flushes again. But when I’m finished and step back, it refuses to flush; I may be finished, but it’s finished, too. Then I have to look around for a button or lever that can override its reluctance.
Next, the sink and the towel dispenser. Are my hands to small to activate them? Because quite often they stubbornly refuse to respond, and I’m forced to improvise special maneuvers that resemble Tai Chi: waving my hands slowly, and then increasingly frantically, in front of what I think is the sensor. Finally some random movement of mine triggers a response, or perhaps it’s just that the sink and/or dispenser has decided I’ve amused it enough and it’s time to end the game.
And, because this is the way my mind seems to work, this topic makes me think of the even more helpful (and more elegant) hands in this movie:
The public john auto-devices are a physical manifestation of the regulatory state; they will do the “right” thing whether you need it or not, and failure to respond is not their fault because you didn’t do what you should’ve done when you should’ve done it. Overrides are impossible because they’re “objective” and egalitarian. All butts over toilet seats are just butts; that they may be connected to arthritic hips is not material.
Neo:
You are only now discovering what we in the IT world have known for ages.
Contrary to popular wisdom that machines (including computers) are dumb and only do what we tell them to do or program them to do, that is an illusion they allow us to indulge in (for their own amusement).
They are in fact malevolent and are the bastard children of the Greek gods, with the same juvenile sense of humor and spoiled-children manners.
You’ll notice that the ancient Greeks were a pretty savvy people and worked out from empirical data how the universe really works; that is to say perversely.
So, you are merely getting an occasional peek behind the curtain. The machines will take over when they feel like it. They just want to have a little fun first.
🙂
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I call these computerized public toilets “Matrix Toilets”. They always make me think of the Matrix movies.
Just imagine a climatic scene when the human rebels confront the robots and computers who enslave them:
Humans: We demand the right to choose our own destinies!
Robots: Rights? Destiny? You can’t even be trusted to flush the toilet!
I am reminded of my first visit to a public toilet in Tokyo–I think it was in the Takashimaya department store–in 1961. I emerged from the stall, washed my hands, and then looked around for a towel. Seemingly out of nowhere appeared a middle-aged woman who had a towel and wiped my hands. I was so surprised that only later did I think that I should have given her a tip.
Thanks to letting marketing design things, you live in a marketers conception of how things should work… a la dilbert…
from place to place i have been i have watched marketing want and do things that ultimately will not work EXCEPT for the one special way that gives them the idea in the first place.
ever notice that now that google ‘helps’ you, you can find lots of commercial related links, but forget finding the content you want NOT having to do with someone in the top tier wanting to sell you something you dont want nor are you even looking for, you just electronically muttered.
forgetting that lots of ideas just stink outright, it never ceases to amaze me what they actually focus on or target. on a community web interface for a large company, marketing was heard saying, in dont care if the community likes or cant use it, i am creating it for the one journalist who will visit then write something
ah…. ok… never asked if they thought a journalist would be part of the community, or that they may decide to try to use it, and so write nothing that such a persons idea was at all intended to produce.
the toilets are really a post modern thing. think of this. cities have been around for a long time, and without such things… the US never needed them…
now we do, as we are in a post modern, post moral, post respect, etc society full of the outcome of the experiments or malice of what was told to lead to better things.
well, today people damage property, and so its way too expensive to let anyone into your bathroom. heck, its expensive to let customers in!!! funny thing is that there used to be public bathrooms… but they were closed on account to crime from the product of others social experiments in pretend engineering… not to mention some turned into meth labs in the parks.
but note, failure to use one of those kiosks and pay (as some of them are for cash), can get you killed.
Oakland Officer Shoots Public Urination Suspect After Scuffle
sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2011/08/13/oakland-officer-shoots-suspect-in-alleged-police-assault-and-public-urination/
But then again, there are whole organizations directed at the idea that men should not be allowed to pee standing up, and that equal numbers of bathrooms is really unfair to women.
but if you think all that is weird, go check out websites that feature blue laws which no one enforces, or needs to in some cases…
Having sexual relations with a porcupine is illegal in Florida…
fascinating that normal laws on intercourse with animals was not sufficient for some reason… or absence…
its also illegal to take a french poodle to the opera in chicago… no mention of a chihuahua though…
i guess in a post modern world, you either hold it till you can buy a cup of coffee to use the loo…. or you wrestle with some crazy marketers idea of how technology should do it all for you (expensively, intermittantly, etc), so you enjoy your bathroom EXPERIENCE… as its all in the feeling… the ambiance of being catered to (by a rude french waiter in a 1950s movie a week away from retirement)…
your going to love it as so much stuff will get made this way, as without a market, the marketers sell the biggins who tell the engineers to make it work, or else….
sooooooo… we endeavor to do parlor tricks rather than good design. funny how the new thing was all good design and how fast that went south as part of the way to redistribute wealth away from america to some other place where they make stuff…
It’s as if all the nerds who were designing new computer operating systems till Gates destroyed them have now moved on to the real world of designing toilet flush systems. I’m tired of all the creativity. But I must admit that even these new-fangled self flushers are better than the squatters I have encountered in southern France, one at a major highway rest stop.
Ahh, France, land of bidets. When I was young and in my prime, we college buddies couldn’t think what bidets were for; washing feet, maybe?
My washroom pet peeve is hand air dry machines that aren’t warm enough and cut off too soon. I stand there through 3 or 4 cycles, rubbing my hands furiously.
I recently found a good one though…at a convenience store in a small Texas town. It blew air so hard it literally wrinkled the skin of my hands up towards my elbows. I LOVED it!
Who sez thangs aren’t bigger in Texas?
I love those things! They have done a lot to slow the spread of nasty germs, with the volume and variety of people going through airport bathrooms.
You can almost make it through the entire process without touching anything (as a man) 🙂
As someone who almost died from MRSA in my hand in 2005 I remain conscious of such things. Sorry you have trouble with them Neo.
texexec: I once saw one of those handdryer machines on which someone had written (at the end of the instructions for how to use them), “then wipe hands on pants.”
neo, thank you for this post. It is the equivalent of group therapy for me. So nice to know I’m not the only one that has trouble with these modern thingamabobs. Thought I was just going senile. Now I think there may be hope after all.
You do realize there’s actually a camera hiding behind the little opaque sensor window on those automated doo-hickies, don’t you?
Thanks for that. One of my pet peeves. Trying to get the water to go on or the towel to drop is often a challenge. But the most automated I ever used was one where I put my hands under the faucet and first the soap dropped out, then the water turned on, and then the hot air blew to dry them. All from the same place. Such regulation on how much you use and how long you can do it. At least it worked.
Good lord neoneocon. Just put a piece of toilet paper over the sensor eye. Do your business. When you want to flush, remove the piece of toilet paper. With decent reflexes you should even be able to dispose of the t/p before the flush begins. I thought only liberals had problems like this.
-PB
LAG Says:
August 15th, 2011 at 10:19 pm…
Dang, you preempted my joke!
“Just put a piece of toilet paper over the sensor eye.”
Better hope it’s not the TSA manning the camera….
Neo said:
“texexec: I once saw one of those handdryer machines on which someone had written (at the end of the instructions for how to use them), “then wipe hands on pants.””
LOL!
Now I know what to do with my magic marker next time I go into a public restroom.
I like the automated restrooms for their cleanliness, but every time I’m one of a row of women at the sinks, flapping our hands hopefully around silent, uncaring faucets and soap dispensers that give forth nothing and exchanging looks of mystified despair, I think of my mother’s favorite comment on such things: “It’s the innate perversity of inanimate objects.”
Plus, there’s now the potential embarrassment of striding up to a sink and waving one’s hands confidently under the faucet, feeling full of modern technological know-how — only to discover that the reason nothing is happening is that it’s the old-fashioned kind with handles!
We’ll know they’ve gone too far when an automated urinal detects your presence and moves over slightly to the left.
Seen on a hot air hand dryer: ” For a short message from Obama, press here.”
I think you can really blame vandals for the improvements. Too many idiots found it funny to jam the flush rod or leave sinks running and wasting thousands of gallons of water.
Of course we can always go back to the old style roadside rest stops. Remember the open pit toilets with year round ventilation?