Published: July 31, 2008 11:54 pm      

New bathroom tech can be unsettling

Editor’s note: Maude offers this column from May 1998, while she takes a much-needed vacation.

Modern technology is beginning to get upsetting, and I’m not just referring to the atomic bomb. I’m not even talking about more recent breakthroughs, though many of them have an unsettling quality to them.

You understand that this is the opinion of an elderly person who grew up in old-fashioned times? Back when, for instance, the only way you could have a baby was to participate in the quaint, old-fashioned art of baby-making. When DNA stood for Doughnut Noshing Area, and atoms were the smallest known things in existence

When a road with one lane going in each direction was considered a major highway. When typewriters were the biggest new wrinkle in the challenge of getting words down on paper, and White Out was revolutionary. When transplanting body parts was something that could only be imagined by the likes of Edgar Allen Poe.

Still, the technology that is beginning to disturb me now is what you find in today’s public bathrooms.

Now, I know that this is not perhaps the most refined subject matter for a columnist of my ladylike reputation, but, I figure, if Dave Barry can go on and on about toilets in the most respectable newspapers in the country, I can discuss bathrooms in this one. Anyway, with my readership, who’s going to know?

The unique inconveniences of modern public bathroom technology first began to come home to me years ago with the public bathroom dryer, a major product of Science Oh So Hard At Work To Serve You. As usual with those who depend on hot air for a living, it was a big disappointment. This little miracle, touted to be the greatest leap forward in sanitation since soap, turned out instead to be slow, inefficient, and exasperating.

It got to the point where folks were bringing toilet tissue out with them from the cubicles to dry their hands on, when suddenly, to the relief of the entire nation, paper towels made a mysterious reappearance. Nowadays, quite often you even get your choice, which just shows the garden-variety good sense of ordinary Americans like you and me in solving the transcendent problems of our times.

Remember old Ned Ludd, Class of about 1800, a sort of Olde English Ted Kaczynski, who hated machinery because he thought technology was ruining the world as he knew it? He attracted a lot of followers who went around smashing machinery at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution? They made quite a name for themselves, which, curiously enough was “Luddites.”

So call me a Bathroom Luddite, if you will, but the latest intrusion of technology in the bathroom has become, in my opinion, a fearsome thing. What I’m talking about is automatic flushing.

Looking back, you know they were working up to this all the time. After all, it must have been at least a decade ago that the highway rest stop before the Washington exit on I-70 came up with these foot pedals for the faucets in the sinks. Unfortunately, they were calibrated so high they splashed out over the top of the sink. That meant you had to step forward on the pedal at the same time as you stepped back to escape getting soaked, which was a good test of your coordination, to start with. And, if you succeeded, you found yourself too far away from the sink to wash your hands.

This however, was not the beginning of the Good Times. The One-Foot Maneuver was actually inaugurated years earlier, when the toilet tank lever had unaccountably turned into a kind of metal peg set exceedingly low on the apparatus. Thus, flushing it with your hand either made your back go out, or inopportunely dipped loose scarves and sleeves into the toilet. Consequently a recent survey discussed by the Washington Post last week (though not, and I say this proudly, so exhaustively as here) revealed a startling new cultural phenomenon: a vast majority of women now stand on one foot in order to flush the toilet in public bathrooms.

And who can blame them?

Nevertheless, the situation was still less than ideal, considering those ladies of a certain age who have trouble standing on one foot for longer than three seconds, let alone applying pressure without falling over. (2008 note: And I wrote this before it even applied to me!) So the Bathroom Committee of the Public Highway Department cleverly invented — Power Flushing. Thus we now have that splendid technological breakthrough — toilets that flush themselves!

Sadly, glitches soon became evident. Initially, you would often be driven mad by searching for the lever and finding nothing to flush. Or else you might not have completed your plans in the cubicle when the toilet would flush without warning, startling, and otherwise afflicting, all within reach. Perhaps even worse, having gotten used to modern technology at last, you’d sometimes exit the cubicle expectantly, but then nothing happened. You’d go back in to look for a lever, and finally leave the scene in a state of considerable trauma, only to hear it flush mockingly as you left the bathroom.

And not only women. A son-in-law reports that the same Power Flushing has been installed in some gender-specific plumbing in men’s bathrooms. One day he was much disconcerted to walk along a row of these implements, setting off each one in turn as he passed, making him feel that he was being tracked by some alien satellite system. Or perhaps the CIA, in cahoots with the Bathroom Committee. He informs me that he left the bathroom immediately.

Sometimes you can’t be too careful.

Maude McDaniel is a Cumberland freelance writer. Her column appears on alternate Sundays in the Times-News.