Okay, an exaggeration, but not much of one. A good 90% of drinking fountains I’ve encountered require that you force your lips upon the germ-infested metal spout and vacuum up the water because the pressure is so low that you can’t get any water otherwise. What’s the problem?
Where do you live? I’ve never encountered that problem. The water pressure may be inadequate.
I know what you mean, Cagey. I’d say the majority of water fountains I encounter aren’t functioning properly, and I always wonder what the major technological flaw is.
Maybe cause the filter has never been changed and it’s clogged and calcified.
Because those responsible for installing and maintaining them never need to drink from them?
Almost never have that problem
I’ll blame it on the water bottle craze.
I recently took my mother of a procedure at a medical office building. The drinking fountain in the hall was something that I could not get a drink out of. I got my water (for a 6 hour wait from the nurse’s station where they had their own water dispenser).
The drinking fountain is going the same way as public phones. - Bring your own water and communication.
Toilets are next I suppose 
Most of my bubblers work just fine. The ones that dont are probably a result of poor maintenance.
Poor maintenance would be my guess too.
Then there’s the problem of bubblers that work too well. You lean down, turn it on, and get an industrial-strength jet of water in your face.
Most bubblers here are being fazed out, so when the malfunction, they rather remove them.
What I have encountered is, not water pressure that is consistently low, but water pressure that changes suddenly, presumably due to someone turning on the water somewhere else in the building.
Because most of them are located in venues where people are more than happy to sell you water, the second most abundant natural resource on the planet, for $1.25 per liter?
That’s a shame, because I often will refill a water bottle from said fountains when I’m out. Our tap water here tastes AWFUL, so we buy water, and when I’m at work, I take a long a bottle and generally keep it filled all the time.
What’s the first?
Sand?
I’d venture to guess either air or dirt.
Stupidity. No, really, take a look around. In fact, it’s the abundance of the first that permits the high prices on the second.
I just find it interesting that a few of you in this thread have referred to drinking fountains as bubblers.
Being a Milwaukee native this is the term that I grew up with and was always told by outsiders that the rest of the world calls them drinking fountains. Now I see an Aussie poster, an Orlando poster and someone else call them bubblers.
I was thinking the exact same thing. I thought it was just us 
.
It’s a bubbler in New England as well.