Tuesday, January 19, 2010

A better way to dry your hands

Recently, the building management where I work sent out a memo to every tenant informing them that, in an effort to reduce energy consumption, cut expenditures, and to "go green", they would be installing a new electronic hand dryer in each of the restrooms. This new dryer would be powerful enough to "actually dry your hands"! as opposed to the rather ineffectual hot air dryers we have grown accustomed to al these years, and the "disease-spreading" paper towels we have had for eons.

This new hand dryer was installed on our floor about 6 weeks ago, in the women's restroom. The sound emanating from behind the closed restroom door was so loud it seemed as if the ladies might suffer from having their petticoats blown off if they stood a mite too close!

After a long wait, we men were granted the privilege of having our very own BluStorm hand dryer installed in the gent's room. What a wonder! This really is the first hand dryer that actually dries your hands, usually in 10-15 seconds. It must be turbo-powered, so strong is the force of air coming from the machine. They even have a nifty soft blue light that comes on when you put your hands underneath the machine to activate it. Sorta like a proximity fuse, I suppose.

I checked a couple of websites to see why there was this nifty soft blue light to help me dry my hands. One site said it made it "more efficient" (but now how) to dry my hands, while another said it was merely to "assist" me in drying my hands.

All these years I never knew that I could not tell where the water was that remained on my hands without that nifty soft blue light! Imagine how much quicker I could have dried my hands in the past if only other hand dryers or maybe even my local paper towel holder had such a nifty soft blue light on it to tell me that my hands were still wet!

Sadly, after little more than a week of action, the nifty soft blue light has died, meaning my hands will be getting dried less efficiently.

R.I.P. nifty soft blue light.

1 comment:

  1. It's probably a good thing; I bet that nifty blue light had some kind of cancer-causing power.

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