How a high-tech bathroom could kill you

2010-08-29 21:30:09

I used to think technologically-advanced public restrooms were awesome. As a slightly neurotic germ-o-phobe, I was thrilled to discover a public space specifically designed to minimize bodily contact with its surfaces.

However, this was before I had 8 million kids.

Now I feel like the newfangled public restroom is out to destroy my sanity -- and my kids are convinced it's out to kill them.

I don't blame them. I mean, from a kid's standpoint, a self-flushing toilet is like a jet-powered, life-threatening vacuum on steroids.

The self-flushing toilet lives up to its name insofar as it only answers to itself. And dude, this contraption can be moody. It rarely seems to flush at the right time. Far as I can tell, the flushing is strictly arbitrary. This is vaguely annoying when you've finished up and are waiting around for it flush so you can leave the stall, or it's heart-wrenchingly terrifying when it roars to life while your precariously perched toddler is still, um, mid-stream.

Doesn't a self-flushing toilet understand how difficult it is to get a newly potty-trained toddler to pee on a foreign toilet in the first place?

I suspect that it does understand but it simply doesn't care. I'm convinced that behind its impersonal, blinking red eye, the self-flushing toilet is laughing to itself every time a toddler leaps off the seat in terror shrieking: "MOMMY! It's gonna suck me down and shoot me out to sea!"

Double points if the toddler sprays her mother with pee. It's a conspiracy, I'm telling you.

It's also entirely possible that self-flushing toilets were invented by someone who decided proper manners were antiquated relics of a bygone era. Why should anyone have to remember to flush the toilet? How ridiculous! In the modern era, robots will clean up after humans, right? Yeah, well, there is no automatic flush for the messes you make in real life, buddy. Learning to clean up after yourself is vital to your success as a civilized human being and important to society as a whole. I'm a mother and I say enabling crass behavior (like not flushing your own mess!) leads straight to all sorts of societal ills. Wall Street, I'm talkin' to you.

Now, self-flushing toilets aside, I do have to admit I am happy public restrooms no longer boast that bastion of filth: the reusable towel. Remember those things? That hanging-in-a-loop piece of fabric always looking like it'd been around long enough to dry the hands of mud-slinging Neanderthals?

Nowadays, we have several high-tech options for drying our hands. My favorite is the hand dryer that blows air with such vein-flattening force that it not only blasts away water droplets but sun-spots, too. I like to stand there shouting above the shrieking din: "Out, out, damn spots!"

Again, however, my kids are not fans of the noisy hand dryers. Also, they don't have sun-spots.

But woe to the Mother who suggests her kids use paper towels. Thanks to their school's week-long Earth Day celebration, my kids now feel guilty about using paper towels. Because Mommy, paper towels once were trees. And these trees gave their lives for what? Just so humans might have dry hands? Really, Mommy, where's your conscience?

My kids have so enlightened me that now we walk out of the public bathroom wildly shaking our hands dry. Or we go totally high-tech and wipe our wet hands on our pants.

Hey, at least we survived the modern public bathroom. That's progress!

Elizabeth Esther is a local freelance writer and married mother of five. She writes weekly for OC Moms about her relationship with the tech world.

More Mom. Technically. by Elizabeth Esther

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