A Trip To The Mens’ Room, And Other Thoughts On Modern Life

I recently made a trip to the men’s room while accompanying a family member to a medical appointment. Is there anything more mundane than a trip to the mens’ room? For men, at least. I have rarely ventured into the exotic atmospheres of ladies’ restrooms – and then only as required by an employer. So for my female readers, you will need to interpolate your typical experience in ladies’ rooms, which are presumably boringly normal. But I digress.

This particular visit to the mens’ room first made me think about how uncommon it was becoming to see an actual mens’ room in a medical building. So many seem to be converting their restroom facilities to single-occupancy unisex restrooms, or what my best friend’s father used to less delicately describe as “one holers”.

After appreciating the increasing rarity of restrooms designated for men and women (or gentlemen and ladies, depending on the sign), something else occurred to me: That virtually the entire process has become completely automated.

Time was, a person had to flush his own toilet with a mechanical valve and work soap dispensers and water faucets just like at home. But this day was different. I opened the door by pressing on the big button on the hallway wall. The light turned itself on as I walked in. After completing the task that took me into the room, the toilet flushed itself as I walked away from it.

I waved my hand under a soap dispenser nozzle and a little drizzle of soap spit out on my hands. Then I waved my hands under the faucet, which started a spray of water. Water, I might add, that had its temperature pre-selected for me. Another sensor activated a motor that advanced a paper towel from yet another automated device. One final push of a wall button and the door opened to accommodate my exit. I started to think that I had not been required to do one single thing for myself in that room, but decided that there had been (thankfully) a single exception.

I wondered just how many electronic sensors and actuators were involved in a normal restroom visit. And I wondered how frequently each of those devices stopped working, so as to prevent someone from completing one or more of the appropriate steps in the process. We have all experienced that – when the soap dispenser doesn’t dispense, when the water will not flow or when the towel dispenser says “Sorry, Bub – it’s just not your day.”

It has been a long time since the days when you could dry your hands on the white cloth towel that looped out of the machine. I always wondered if those just allowed a continual re-use of a dirty towel, or if they just stopped at the end of a roll. A little quick research shows that they are still made, but I have not seen one in forever. I would think that they would be more popular, with all the recent emphasis on sustainability. But maybe the idea of sustainability only goes so far.

And what about the old powdered soap dispensers? You remember, the ones that actually made you thoroughly wash your hands to get all of the gritty Borax powder off of them. Gone are the days when your hands could be cleaned with the power of a 20 mule team. At least in a modern mens’ room.

Perhaps I am just old-fashioned (OK, you can stop laughing – of course I am) but I do not mind pushing buttons, pulling levers or twisting valves for myself. I will admit that I probably get more enjoyment out of working mechanisms than the normal person, and I will also admit that I still carry enough of the German Farmer attitude, which says that things should be kept simple to eliminate ways for them to fail. And maybe the electronics involved in the automated equipment is actually cheaper than building a good, solid manual version.

Or maybe this will become the norm in the same way that power windows and power mirrors have become the norm in our cars. I am not sure when power windows and/or power mirrors changed from “luxurious” to “normal”, but it has been quite a long time ago. I have gotten used to power windows and power mirrors (they are even in my truck at work!) so I will probably become used to fully automated mens’ rooms too. But I am not there yet.

27 thoughts on “A Trip To The Mens’ Room, And Other Thoughts On Modern Life”

  1. Good observations. It seems the automated lavatory began (from my experience) in the mid-90s with automatic flushing toilets and it has only grown from there. It looks like the technology has been flushed, I mean fleshed, out.

    The towel roll you have pictured is something I do not miss. Years ago, when in elementary school, the boy’s room had about a half-dozen of these along the wall near the large, round communal sink. There was an ongoing issue of certain little gentlemen wiping things other than their hands, and noses, on these. Seeing one still prompts the same reaction.

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  2. I don’t mind the technology, so long as it works. At my office one of the lavatories has a tempermental flush sensor, occasionally when I go in there I have to hold my hand in front of the optic sensor, count to 10 slowly and pull it away to dispose of the previous occupant’s efforts. I don’t know why people can’t figure this out.

    Mind you, mechanical technology can be odd too. I remember when I first visited the UK 30 years ago I had trouble with flushing, until I realized you had to grab the handle firmly, and rotate it a full 90 degrees quickly. Go slow or gentle and nothing happens.

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    • “I don’t know why people can’t figure this out” – says the engineer. 🙂 I agree with you, but then my mind tends to work in ways compatible with those of you engineers.

      I would trade regular cleaning for all of the gadgets. But then the gadgets are probably far cheaper than regular cleaning.

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  3. The automation probably has something to do with making things easier for the disabled, especially in a medical facility. It’s easier for a disabled person to push the button to open the door, etc. And with ensuring that the toilet is flushed. IIRC the mid-’90s is when the ADA really came into force.

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  5. The shared cloth towel would roll until someone changed it and so you could get a different part that was worse than the other. If you went to a filling station where they fixed on your car you could hit a real black spot. I always have trouble with the motion sensor things.

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      • I had a photo assignment at a high end mutual fund company one time. I had to use the bathroom, and on the counter was a basket of clean, laundered, and rolled cotton hand towels, with a discard basket under the counter when you were done. Then the cleaning staff took those and washed them every night in bleach and scent. Ahhh, now that’s a civilized society!

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  6. I am not opposed to automation but it gets reduced to the absurd when the inconvenience of electronic failures or complications outweigh the benefits received by the user. When automated prostate exams start popping up in rest rooms, I am going to restrict my outings to places with forest areas nearby.

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  8. This was on my list of things to bitch about in a “Why I Hate Technology” post.

    I detest the automated everything in the lav. The faucet sensors in so many of them are prissy and precise, you practically have to stroke it (the sensor) to get the damn thing to come on. And if you move your hands outside of the narrow range it can acknowledge you, no more water.

    Air dryers spray all those water droplets all over the room and often have the same issues with picking up movement as the faucets do. I generally don’t mind the motion-activated thing on the paper towel dispensers… why can’t they use that sensor on the sinks, FFS. And given the number of times I’ve been behind someone that didn’t wash his hands at all before grabbing the handle to the door (or pushing that shiny button), I REALLY prefer paper towels in the lav.

    I’m not even a so-called germophobe… I couldn’t imagine how debilitating it must be for someone like that to have to use a public/public-enough bathroom.

    I get the argument about touching faucet knobs after everyone else did… but the solutions put into place have been mediocre at best.

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    • Yes, those restrooms are a great place to NOT be a germaphobe. Although I am reminded of a biology assignment when I was in high school – we were to take samples from places in the school and dip them into a petri dish of ager to see what kind of bacteria grew. I had the idea to take a sample from a toilet handle, figuring that I would grow germs aplenty from that one. It turned out that almost every other sample grew more germs than the bathroom handle sample did. That surprised me.

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  9. If you’ve ever been to a “Ted’s Montana Grill” restaurant (Ted Turner), he still puts Borax into the restroom soap dispensers. As for the “facilities” themselves, you have me wondering about college dorms. Back in the 1980s, visiting a high school friend at Cal Berkeley, I was shocked when a female student walked into the same restroom I was in. Didn’t realize the dorms had “shared” facilities. That was 40+ years ago! I’m guessing the approach is commonplace in dorm design these days.

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  10. Interesting post JP. I have not been in that ultra-modern of a restroom and I admit I’d have been a bit awestruck by it. 🙂 I do remember that gritty pink hand soap that lumped up and those dispensers which always seemed to have dirty towel where you wanted to wipe your hands. Paper towel dispensers were either empty, or you pulled and 15 came out at a time. I wonder if these modern, touch-free restrooms are a byproduct of COVID, thus being touch-free? I can picture them breaking down and someone messing with them because they wanted to wash their hands and subsequently breaking them in an effort to fix them. I can remember my journalism class in college took a tour of the new, state-of-the-art “Detroit News” publishing plant. We were able to view the workings of the presses from elevated catwalks which looked down into that area like med students view surgeries in the “operating theater” from elevated platforms. The class was fascinated with all the technology from the presses, etc., but the females were even more fascinated by the toilets that flushed automatically when you stood up, quite a novelty back in the mid-70s.

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    • I’ll bet a self-flushing toilet was a real sight back in the 70s. Kind of like the time I was microwave ovens in use at the Wright-Patterson Air Force Museum in the early 1970s. I didn’t actually see the microwave ovens, but only the great big signs at the entry of a cafeteria area that warned that they were in use and for anyone with pacemakers to stay away!

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      • The self-flushing toilet in the 70s was quite a novelty for us girls. 🙂 Interesting re: the microwave and pacemaker interference. I bought a microwave in the 80s and brought it home and put it on a table in the basement as there was limited counter space in our kitchen. My mom was reading through the manual, with page after page of cautions and she called downstairs to me “box that thing up and take it back – it’s unsafe!” I also went to that museum, probably in the 1970s with my father. My mom didn’t care to go. What an array of planes they had and were they suspended from the ceiling (or I might be thinking of one of the Smithsonian museums).

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  11. The “automatic” restrooms can be counted on to work in medical facilities. (No doubt the lower volume of traffic helps in that regard.)

    Things get iffy in places like convenience stores. Not all of the gizmos in the bathroom at any Sheetz (at central Pennsylvania chain of convenience stores) can be counted on to work reliably.

    Manufacturers of this hardware need to take a page from 1950s Detroit and think up jazzy names to keep us interested…Hydraflush…Soap-a-Matic…Faucetflite.

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