Royal Flush

I recently took a business trip to the Windy City. While waiting at the MSP airport I visited the restroom in order to avoid having to use those God-awful wash closets on the aircraft. I headed to the women’s restroom that was right next to my gate and upon entering I saw that it was, overall, a nice restroom. It was clean, spacious, and only had a slight “bathroom” odor – nothing unbearable. Let’s just say I have experienced way worse restrooms in my lifetime. But unfortunately, despite my expectations based on the overall look of the restroom upon entering, it quickly turned sour as I sat down to actually do my business. After only being seated for a few brief seconds, my behind was suddenly sprayed with water as the toilet decided it was time to flush, even though I was still in mid-pee! As I finished peeing I reached for the toilet paper, only to be sprayed again as the toilet’s auto-flush function decided it needed to perform another flush cycle. As I stood and pulled my pants up...yep, flush #3!

Are you kidding me?!

This overactive toilet got me stewing about how much I loathe automatic flush toilets. My experiences with them have typically been irritating. Nine times out of ten the toilets either:

Flush too soon or too frequently giving you not enough time to do your business before these over-active (and I might be so daring to say aggressive toilets) are declaring that it is time for you to be done,

Don’t flush when they should so you end up standing there waving your hand in front of the sensor trying to get it to understand that you are in fact done and ready for it to do its job now, only to realize that has refused to flush on its own so you end up having to push the manual flush button anyway, 

and/or

     The flush is so forceful that toilet water sprays all over the place. This one is the most irritating because the contaminated water spray either hits your butt (if it is a flush-happy toilet) while you are still sitting there, or the spray goes all over the seat after you’ve stood up. If toilet water sprays on the seat after the user has risen from the throne then I usually end up sitting down on a wet seat due to the flush from the previous user. And that is no fun at all. If water sprays on the seat after I use it, then I try my best to wipe that water off so that the next user doesn’t a) have to sit on a wet seat, or b) think that I have some serious aim issues and get all disgusted with me. An additional problem arises when wiping spray off of a seat of a flush-happy toilet because no matter my efforts to be courteous to the next stall patron, the toilet will continue to flush and spray water all over the seat before and after I wipe the seat down rendering my courtesy efforts futile.

So, back to my story… I leave the stall at the airport irritated that my restroom experience has been soured and head to the sink to wash my hands. What do I find? An automatic faucet AND an automatic soap dispenser! Seriously?! My hand washing experience further sours my restroom experience because as I try to rinse my hands the stupid faucet keeps shutting off before I have had enough time to fully rinse them. I’m standing there waving my hands back and forth in front of the sensor trying desperately to get it to stay on long enough to rinse the soap off. And to top it off the flow is so slow that it honestly takes me at least a minute and a half to wash my hands. Ridiculous. And, while we are on the topic of automatic faucets, don’t even get me started on the frustration of using an auto-faucet sink to mix a bottle of baby formula! The temperature for these sinks is always on one setting: COLD! My poor babies have had to drink cold formula far too many times all because of those stupid automatic faucets.

My restroom experience is nearing its sour-full end as I head to the opposite wall to dry my hands. Now, those Dyson Airblade hand dryers really are efficient at drying your hands very quickly. And my 5-year-old loves them cause she thinks they are fun. But man are they LOUD!! You get 4 or 5 of them going at once and the noise is deafening. I hate taking my 6-month-old into restrooms with automatic hand dryers because the loudness of the dryers scare her and make her cry every time. In this technologically advanced day in age, is no one able to figure out a way to make these automatic dryers less noisy?!

This one experience in a public restroom epitomizes my disdain for fully automated restrooms. Has our society become so obsessed with finding ways to limit our personal freedoms that we no longer feel that people are intelligent enough to be able to manually use toilets & sinks or manually dry our hands? Sure, that perspective may seem a bit extreme. I know that there are logical reasons why restrooms are fully automated. But come on! I just simply long for the good old days when I could flush my own toilet when I was good and ready, wash my hands using as much water at the temperature of my choosing, and dry my hands with an old fashioned paper towel (or two … or three).