💾 Archived View for zaibatsu.circumlunar.space › ~solderpunk › phlog › home-again-tyranny-of-robot-b… captured on 2024-06-16 at 12:40:50.
⬅️ Previous capture (2023-03-20)
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Home again, and the tyranny of robot bathrooms ---------------------------------------------- I arrived back home in Finland today after about a month or so of travelling. The travelling was approximately half for work and half for pleasure. Both sides of that went quite well and on the whole I'm feeling good about life, but it sure is good to be home again. Expect my frequency of phlogging to gradually increase and the delay in my replying to emails to gradually decrease as I get back into my online groove. Apologies to those of you who have been suffering the most from my reduced responsiveness. A quick rant which I suspect might be well-received in gopherspace: Over the past month a much higher proportion than usual of my trips to the bathroom have taken place on planes or in airports, on trains or in train stations, in petrol stations, restaurants and other not-remotely-homely locations. As a result, I'm well and truly sick and tired of robot bathrooms, where it seems like just about anything which can be automated will be automated, although very rarely well. Sometimes this extends even to flushing the toilet when you stand up, but the most common targets are getting soap onto your hands, getting water running over your hands and then drying them. It's not uncommon for this entire three-part process to rely on various sensors for turning things on and off. It's very common for at least one stage in the process to either not work at all, or to work very poorly indeed: say, the water or the hot air comes on when you put your hands in the right place but if you move your hands by more than an inch or so it cuts out, so if you want to actually wash or dry your hands enough to make a difference you get this irritating lowfrequency pulse-width modulation system happening. Or maybe the sensor turns the water on, but it gets switched off after approximately one quarter of the amount of time it takes to properly wash your hands. It hasn't happened to me yet, but I live in fear of the inevitable day that I get a nice big blob of soap precision-delivered to my open palm and then find that none of the taps will turn on at all, and there's no paper towel to wipe it off with, just automatic hand driers... Given that this stuff often works so badly, and/or breaks down much more often than "old fashioned" bathrooms (you know, the kind we all survive perfectly well using at home), one has to wonder why we so routinely bother with the extra expense and environmental impact. Many people will mention, no doubt, that it's more hygenic to use sensors so people aren't all touching the same germy surfaces. There's something to this, I'm sure, but it doesn't apply to soap dispensers (which you only touch immediately prior to washing your hands with soapy water), and I think that in approximately half of robot bathroom encounters, the first thing you do after washing your hands is to touch a germy door handle on the way out, which seems rather to defeat the point. It feels, like so many things, like technology for the sake of technology, with only quite flimsy arguments in its favour. The few times I encountered a fully manual bathroom in my travels, I honestly found it a small relief.