June 2005 Archives

With annotations as necessary.

The bathroom I frequent at work has one of those automated paper towel dispensers, the kind where you wave your hand in front of an infrared light to let it know you want to wipe your hands. I'm convinced the thing has a mischievious mind of its own. Sometimes, I'll stand right in front of it, frantically waving a wet hand, and the thing obstinately chooses to ignore me. Then, when I give up and turn to leave the bathroom in frustration, it catches the movement and cheekily dispenses a towel, as if to assert its mechanical superiority by saying "Oh, you were talking to me?"

Why does that thing even have an infrared sensor? You'd think that after nearly half a century of documented mishaps, engineers would figure out that the Glowing Red Eye™ is a dangerous—and at times deadly—design flaw.