Excellent explanation.
Disgusting as well.
Moderating:
Let’s get back to inventions. I think that’s enough about hunting.
For public restrooms, I believe the hot air hand dryer replaced paper towels. The latter is superior in most respects.
Watches are better for paying close attention to time for sure.
But… I’m finding that my lame little rebellion against the modern world of putting my phone on mute and not having a wristwatch means that I feel a lot more in deliberate control of what I do and when I do it. I don’t feel dragged around by my watch or my phone nearly as much as I used to.
My workplace still provides paper towels, but they also installed these hand dryers many years ago:
They are deafeningly loud, made all the worse because a bathroom has nothing but hard surfaces to reflect all of that sound back at your ears. The only thing that’s worse is the classic white hand dryer with the big metal push-button that’s been around for decades - famous for delivering an asthmatic stream of air that takes the better part of a minute to develop any meaningful warmth. You can spend two minutes supplicating to one of those and still walk away with wet hands.
My employer removed the air driers (which worked really well, fwiw) due to covid. There had still been towel dispensers, i assume they just fill them more often now.
Yep - I forgot to mention that my employer covered ours up for the pandemic. They’re still under wraps, as are the drinking fountains (only the “hydration stations” for refilling bottles are uncovered).
Thanks!
I lament the loss of drinking fountains due to COVID. I wonder if they’ll ever come back. I wonder if I could buy an old one for my house if they have to be removed? (I’m only semi-serious about this, but it would be awesome)
As to hand drying, I’m old enough to remember towel service towels. My church had them, as well as other places. They were long white cloth towels held in a double roller device. You grabbed the towel, pulled it down to get fresh, unused cloth, and dried your hands. The wet part re-rolled back into the dispenser. The towel service people came by on a schedule and swapped out the used towel rolls and took the used ones back to their laundry. They worked fine to dry hands, but I don’t think people would accept them nowadays.
I liked them.
Drinking fountains are utterly unchanged where I live and most of where I travel. Yes, some shut down during COVID. But they’re substantially all back now.
They’ve mostly gone in this area of Florida. However the only times I’ve tried have been former public fountains, so private ones like in malls may still be there (and the ones at Disney are still there as far as I remember). I suspect that in my area that safety was a cover for governments not having to pay for them/pay people who maintain them enough to retain them.
Knowing what we now know about COVID, drinking fountains don’t play any role in its spread, right?
What I’m seeing now instead of drinking fountains are similar stations meant to refill water bottles. (Example here.)
I think new buildings were being built without drinking fountains well before COVID. Our town built a new high school in 2015 and there are no drinking fountains (aka “bubblers” here in New England), just the water bottle refill stations. So closing the fountains for COVID may have been last gasp for them anyway.
As shown in your link, some of them are combination drinking fountains/filling stations. And I’ve seen both kinds in real life.
Pneumatic chair height adjustment is a big step backward from mechanical height adjustment, given that the former has much more tendency to fail. Its only advantage is that it takes a few fewer seconds to try out a chair in the store, which is probably how this mutation of Gresham’s Law (bad technology drives out good technology) worked.
This is true. But it is also possible to buy a replacement pneumatic chair cylinder for around $30 if you google around a bit. It appears to be a a fairly standard and easily replaceable part. If the rest of the chair is in good shape, just replace the cylinder. I figured this out after I already bought a new chair when all I had to do was the place the cylinder in the old one.
Maybe I buy the wrong kind of chairs, but I’ve never had a cylinder be the problem that sends the chair to the landfill. Instead the casters fall apart, the cloth or leather gets crappy, leg(s) get broken, etc.