Angry When Wet

I have a new rule in my life: If I find myself in a commercial establishment that refuses to put paper towels in their restroom, I will immediately burn that establishment to the fucking ground because, seriously, if you can’t splurge on paper towels to dry my hands with, you suck more ass than Clay Aiken on vacation.

I, like every other human being in the Westernized world, has made it a habit to check for toilet paper if I need to “drop the kids off at the pool”, if you catch my drift. It’s a safety-check born out of experience. Horrible, waddling-around-a-public-restroom-looking-for-a-stall-with-toilet paper experience. But you never think to check for paper towels before you commit, and so you’re sitting there at the sink, washing up, when you look around and realize that your only hands-drying option is that fucking air-blower that was installed sometime during the Eisenhower administration. Fuck.

Here, for those of you who aren’t allowed out in public, is how these fucking things work:

1. Press button
2. Rub hands under nozzle
3. Wipe hands on pants

Seriously, these things never fucking work. I remember the first time my eldest son saw one of these things. He was three.

Son: Where are the towels?

Daddy: They don’t have any. You have to use this air dryer. (pushes button)

Son: (hides)

(5 minutes later)

Daddy: There you go, just keep rubbing your hands together.

(dryer turns off)

Daddy: Ok, let’s go.

Son: But my hands are still wet!

Daddy: I know, those things never work. Just wipe your hands on your pants.

Son: Daddy, that makes NO SENSE.

Putting a hands-drying machine in a bathroom that fails to dry hands makes no sense. My three year old understood that and I still had to teach him basic bathroom rules such as “Don’t lick the urinals”. It puzzled him enough that we discussed the situation on the way home.

Son: Daddy, why would that put that thing in there if it didn’t work?

Daddy: You mean in the bathroom? They put it in there because they are a bunch of ignorant, lazy fucks, and I am going to burn Sears to the goddamn ground.

Son: Hahaha!!!

Daddy: …

Son: Daddy? You’re just joking, right?

Daddy: As far as you are concerned? Yes. Ooh, look! A gas station!

Sears: We’re not the brightest department store around. We bought K-Mart!

I love how they try to explain the need for the hot air dryers. There’s usually some text on the dryer that says, “To help prevent the spread of disease…” I don’t know about you, but I don’t shop at a lot of leper colonies. What kind of disease are we talking about here? Is there some sort of plague that attacks only people with dry hands?

They should put a more accurate statement on those fucking things: “Because we’re too lazy to actually clean our own restrooms, the trash can would fill up with wet paper towels, and when that happened you filthy animals would just drop your wet paper towels next to the trash can and it made a huge mess. What is wrong with you people? The trash is full! Why can’t you just take the wet towels home with you? Or better yet, don’t wash your hands! We don’t! – McDonald’s Management”

I did notice that IKEA has those cool, Dyson air blade hand dryers that you stick your hands into. That’s kind of fun. It makes it seem like you’re handling radioactive materials or something. You stick your hands in, a high powered jet of air blasts them, you pull them out slowly, wipe your hands on your jeans, and go off to eat some horse-balls in the cafeteria, because those things don’t fucking work either.

Clearly hot air isn’t working, so I think stores should experiment a little bit. When they discover that you get the exactly the same results rubbing your hands over a rutabaga, they can save themselves the time, money, and hassle of installing an air dryer in the first place, and since they’ve saved all that time, money, and hassle, they can put it to good use by PUTTING SOME FUCKING PAPER TOWELS IN THERE, ASSHOLES!

AAAUUUUGGGGHHHHH!

So, I went to the mall today. What did you do?