Bathroom Hand Driers

take your own paper towels

At lunch a few weeks ago at a swanky on-the-ocean hotel in Vero Beach, I stopped by the mens’ room on the way to our poolside table.  No sooner had I entered the bathroom than I chose to beat a retreat, gasping, and arrived at the table before the rest of our party was seated.  The smell was unbearable in there!

I won’t go far off into Poopland on you here, but let me just say that in all my years I have never encountered such a ghastly odor, and that includes driving through Greeley, Colorado when the wind’s wrong.  The home of various rendering plants and feed lots and slaughter houses and meat processing plants, and standing acres of feces, the combined smells there are routinely beyond your imagination.  I wretched one morning in a goose blind five miles away, so powerful was the odor wafting across the fields .

That Vero Beach bathroom smelled worse than Greeley.

At lunch it occurred to me that there had been a man in the bathroom when I entered, standing at one of those forced air machines, calmly letting the air blow over his hands to dry them.  The ancient saying goes, “Every man loves the smell of his own fart.”  It had to be the dealer himself standing there taking time to dry his hands.  Was he humming?  No, I must have imagined that.  He must have known something had died within him-- a piece of his gut, a bowel section, and he had let it out.  He didn’t have long to live.

I thought about it over lunch, unfortunately.  Where do you think that forced air from the dryer comes from?  NO, it’s not piped in, it comes from the very air you’re breathing.  Sure, there’s probably a filter inside the dryer gizmo to keep roaches from ending up in your wringing hands, but, come on, it’s a very small, cheap filter.  Hand dryers blow fecal particles into your skin, into the air you’re breathing, which is going back in the blower...circulating endlessly.  

Better to soap up quickly, rinse, then wipe your hands on your silk pants.  Or, take a towel in with you.  

If that man moves to Greeley they’ll start having odor reports on the Weather Channel.