Home again, and the tyranny of robot bathrooms
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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.