Something has taken place slowly over the past few years in the United States. And it’s basically complete.
No, the whole nation isn’t one company. Yet.
There are basically no manual appliances left in public spaces. Save for the occasional water fountain (and there are automatic ones and they basically don’t work and are completely terrifying – the process is basically walking up to a machine and having it spit at you), you are no longer expected to press buttons or flush toilets or turn cranks. Everything is automated. Faucets, toilets, urinals, hand dryers (both paper towel dispensers and hot-air blowers) all have little red motion sensors that determine when the appropriate time to work is without the overt control of the humans, well, using them.
At first blush, of course, this seems like enormous convenience. No longer do we have to actually exhaust our digits by – the horror – turning a knob! Merely wave hands in the general direction of where water is supposed to spring from and – voila – it is sprung! Weep, ye ancestors of humanity who died toiling in the men’s room of the past, furiously pulling your own paper towels from their slot.
But once we get past the idea of these machines and to their actual use, the picture of perfect ease gets murkier. For one thing, the shelf life of the motion sensors is awfully short. And what this means, functionally, is that the closer to the end of the sensor’s life we get, the more it becomes like – wait for it – a button. I think we’ve all had the experience of furiously trying to get the water to release from the spigot by waving, then contorting, then sort of just pawing our hands around the vague sink area, hoping to just make the faucet work already, something never before so challenging in the history of faucets. In most instances, if you can actually just see the blinking red light indicating the sensor’s location, you can merely press your finger to it and the thing will do its job. Unless the sensor is so old that is just broken, which is an increasingly regular occurrence. I’m not exactly certain how often sink handles had to be replaced in the old days, but I bet it was less than once a decade in all but the roughest of establishments.
Which brings us to the question of the purported environmentalism of all this automation. Certainly hand-dryer blowers are nothing new to bathrooms in America, though they used to have (gasp!) buttons along with their lecturey signage about how hot air was more sustainable and environmental than paper. Which seems sort of true in a world where we don’t question where the electricity comes from or what its creation is doing to the planet. I haven’t precisely run the numbers on paper towel count vs. how much power it takes to run a blower and I don’t know exactly how to quantify x number of trees vs. y units of coal energy in terms of what it’s doing to Earth… I’m not sure this information is exactly knowable (see also: paper or plastic, which has been punted to canvas/tote, which itself has raised a whole host of environmental questions regarding just how many tote bags humans need). But I do know how much energy and/or trees used to go into faucets or urinals. That would basically be zero.
But when we factor in the replacement costs and that impact on sustainability, not to mention the process of turning every appliance in a public restroom into a little computer, it doesn’t seem like this was a terribly environmentally motivated decision at all. If this had an environmental angle at all, it seems to have been swept up in what so many such endeavors devolve into in this country: an opportunity to spend money buying something new because it’s environmental! Never mind that the whole point of the movement hinges on reducing and reusing instead of manufacturing and buying… the best way to show support for the environment is to buy Environment-Brand Stuff! I’m not saying every or even most environmentalist actually buys in (get it?) to this mentality, but it feels like the mainstream of people feel good about themselves for buying more products than they otherwise would as long as they have a vague greeny feel about them. And, like most things, this scales up in big institutions.
I guess there’s the other environmental issue of the person in the bathroom who leaves the sink running for a week or who flushes the toilet 27 times when they actually need to maybe twice. The environmental issue here is water and the thesis is that bad/neglectful people will waste more of it than very smart machines. I’d be more of a believer in this if the machines themselves demonstrated much intelligence. I am really looking forward to being able to get a Google self-driving car, but if they run on the same general principle as these motion sensors built into public restrooms, they will alternate between stopping in the middle of nowhere, then kind of stutter-stepping for a few feet before stopping forever and smashing full-tilt into whatever they can hit. It’s an unnerving and increasingly common experience to be sitting on a public toilet when the motion sensor decides that you simply must be done already and decides to throw full suction at the bowl without warning. Similarly, I’ve had to do bizarre dances and door-swinging maneuvers to try to leave other stalls in a human condition for the future user, endlessly cajoling the stingy motion sensor to release its cleansing waters.
I’m sure the process of adding a blinky red light to every appliance in every public restroom in the country helped the economy a lot and may be credited as one of the only reasons we’re supposedly out of the Great Recession. (Of course, as I’ve discussed, we’re not.) But I suspect the real reason for all this automation wave has more to do with something I’ve discussed even more recently, which is the national obsession with the outbreak and spread of deadly diseases. Or, y’know, at least colds.
It’s become an increasingly known and documented fact that our hands, seemingly our most innocuous and extendable parts, are dirtier than the worst incarnation of the Peanuts character Pigpen, while other areas we might be more concerned about, such as our thighs, are actually remarkably clean. This fact does not deter anyone from shaking hands with others or even mean that we tear down the doors of public restrooms, but it probably is the main culprit behind removing handles from toilets, urinals, soap-dispensers, and sinks in public places. The sink one is especially important, since we’d have to touch the handles with freshly-washed hands over and over again… who knows where those freshly-washed hands have… oh.
You can probably guess by now that I think this effort as a way of stopping disease, much less serious disease like, say, ebola, is a fool’s errand. Admittedly my father did raise me to flush a public toilet with my feet rather than my hands, but I really doubt a lot of people before were getting sick from public bathrooms. More likely it was from kissing people and shaking their hands and going to hospitals and all the other really contagious things that we tend to do as a species. And maybe I’m wrong and it’s marginally aiding our health never to have to touch handles in bathrooms. But my guess is that the margin, if applicable, is really quite small and is dwarfed by the expense of constantly getting new sensors installed (to say nothing of it being erased by the sensors that just become buttons).
No, like many innovations of our modern world, my guess is this one is more about the illusion of increased health, the gentle placebo that comes from replacing something vaguely icky with something really frustrating. As long as we don’t think that the public restroom is making us sick, then it’s worth any expense to be spared the indignity of turning a knob that some other human has touched before us.
Of course, people continue to stockpile ebola suits and get them for the whole family … just in case. So maybe a time will come soon when we will all literally live in our own little bubbles and never have to touch each other at all. Just make sure you sneak your cell phone inside the suit first. It’s awfully hard to text with ebola-suit-fingers.
