My training as an artist has fine-tuned my sensitivity towards objects and environments that have poor designs, but recently my cup seems to be running over with frustration in the ubiquitous public restroom, where automated faucets and toilets, soap and paper towel dispensers have a mind of their own, turning on and off at will whether I am ready to use them or not. For the normal Joe or Jane hoping for a quick and private trip, a collection of technical gadgets awaits, with the intention of wiping us clean off the face of the next countertop.
Nowadays, I would almost rather have my bathroom privileges revoked than try to navigate the shiny appliances that greet me in a public restroom. From my view, it seems as if I have entered an operating room where I will be made to stay awake during surgery while questionable robotic objects perform their activities on me. I made the error of thinking I could make a quick dash into a public restroom, and hoping to make a good impression, fine tune my appearance and escape unscathed. I had no idea that I was about to enter an appliance nightmare, a situation ripe for ablutionary awkwardness.
First, the automated urinal did not flush on cue but continued blinking as if it had. I couldn’t just leave it there like that, so I stood waiting for a long second, hoping the sensor would see me. I thought ok, let’s move on, but just as I did, the urinal decided to begin flushing continuously, sending a waterfall over the porcelain cliff onto the floor. Trying to overcome my sense of failed responsibility, I leaned part of my body back, rather precariously, in order to stop Niagara Falls from becoming a scenic stop-over.
When that didn’t work, I wondered whether starting the whole process…yes, I mean the entire process…over again would somehow be picked up by the motion detector and turn off the waterfall. Just as I was in the middle of that deep thought, the bathroom door swung open and another person walked in. Rather than be caught in that no man’s land between are-you-going to-use-that-urinal-or-aren’t-you, I had to act like I had just entered the bathroom myself and had nothing to do with the mess I had created.
Wow,” I said to the newcomer, “wonder how long that’s been running?” I took his lack of reply as an opportunity to move away towards a regular stall. I can tell you that pretending to use the bathroom when you don’t have to is not normal. I have enough trouble going when it is normal, but there you go.
When the bathroom emptied of visitors, I realized I had built up a lot of resentment about this trip to a public restroom, resentment that I believe was detected by the soap dispenser. When I approached the sink to wash up, I tried to do the special wave but nothing came out – not one puff of soap. Another couple of anxiety-ridden waves later I was still waving at a continuously flashing, beeping red light until, exhausted, the soap dispenser began to create a wheezing noise that made me think it might have pneumonia. For those of you who have experienced a raspy cough or an allergy attack, the sound of a soap dispenser in respiratory failure is not pleasant at all – the only recourse is to do more frantic waves to get it calmed down, a kind of CPR if you will. Apparently, soap dispensers in respiratory failure ARE still able to count our waves, because three minutes later, it suddenly began pumping out what can only be described as white loops very similar in appearance to Dannon yogurt.
Deciding to get the water going while the soap calmed down, I looked at the minimalist sink, a long slab that angled slightly downward to catch the running water. This slab had no lip on it, having been fabricated as one ridiculously modern surface made of unattractive concrete. I placed my hands under a shiny faucet tube, and began my special wave again, the one that looks like I am trying to swat flies away from a hamburger. Nothing happened. I waved faster. Nothing still. Thinking I could trick the sensor, I slid slowly down to the next one, but then the first faucet suddenly woke up and came on with a short blast that angled off the concrete straight up and across the wall-to-wall mirror. When I stepped back to avoid the splash, the second one came on with a similar blast and a noise that is normally reserved for a fasten-your-seat-belt signal on a plane that has declared May Day. In the meantime, another man suddenly appeared next to me, trying to adjust his tie through a mirror covered in a wide swath of splattered water.
“It was like that when I got here,” I say, glancing over, “but at least there’s plenty of soap,” I meekly pointed out.
I am buying time here, hoping he will become very uncomfortable and leave. In my head, I am trying to figure out how to find the paper towel dispenser, dry my hands and clothes and get out of this public automated restroom hellhole. In some very dark corner of my mind, I am holding back thoughts of murdering one of these objects whose faked brilliance and pretentious armor seems unapproachable. Thankfully, some of the soap had turned to attractive foamy cumulus clouds which were now floating above my head. Their poofs were so attractive that I tried to scoop one out of thin air, and make a thin white mustache above my upper lip.
Let me just pause here to remind you that this very event is happening everywhere, from opening to closing time, in every public bathroom in the Continental United States, including cities formally thought of as rather clean, like Marion, Ohio and Temper Lake Kentucky. Just the wastage in water and soap alone has reached tragic proportions, and I haven’t even got out of the bathroom yet. I cautiously step towards the paper towel dispenser but slide on a river of water left by someone else. At a moment of unfortunate imbalance, I was forced to make a stab for the dispenser, but instead pulled out four feet of paper towels to regain my balance. Standing there, holding a huge wad, I begin to feel that I was not capable of navigating the changes modern technology has introduced to public restrooms.
I am aware that the automated waste can has detected me, and that a small slit is opening for me to deposit my paper clump. Being somewhat athletic, I believes I can be quicker than this spring-operated door and risking everything, quickly shove the wet lump in before it closes on my hand and exposing it to a glossary of unmentionable stains. However, the spring is a bit stronger than I anticipated, and my hand becomes stuck. In quiet desperation bordering on rage, I am talking to my other hand now, asking it politely to help me, to have mercy on me even if it means touching a variety of medical abominations on the trach can opening.
Out of nowhere, a small boy enters, a mere child, who takes out a huge glob of gum from his mouth and sticks it on the top of the back of my hand… and then leaves! It happened so quick I didn’t have time to object.
This child was very short and seemed to fly in under the appliance radar. I realize I am trapped in a motion detector crossfire in a public bathroom built for another race of small aliens who have big eyes, chew gum all the time and have cratered skin that morphs easily when exposed to shiny appliances. They are a race who can move so quickly in and out of bathrooms that beeps and blinks have no effect on them whatsoever. This is their home now, and they will eventually take over our planet simply because we cannot defend ourselves when our hands are stuck in automated trash cans. We will get one final look at ourselves in the mirrored waterfall that has tiny puffy clouds of soap rolling past. It’ll be a quiet end, with only the sound of urinals settling down for the night, and it will happen across our fair land in restrooms that we thought were meant for us – the public restroom, where privacy lost its power to the wave, but plenty of paper towels made a bed for us in the corner.