How To: Hand Dryers, the Perils of

Hello! So sorry I haven't written anything in a while. I was busy doing college-y things! And/or I was watching Fringe and trying to decode the secret word message in each episode. Either way. But I am back! So. Let's talk about hand dryers.

First of all, there are virtually no bathrooms in my entire school that have paper towels to dry your hands with. One of the main reasons this is--claim the people in charge--is because paper towels kill trees. Which is true. I'm pretty sure paper towels are made out of tree parts. But then you get hand dryers. Which use electricity! I don't know which uses more energy, paper towels or electricity, but it seems like either one is going to be killing the planet! And yet, we go for the inconvenient ones.

Which conveniently brings me to my next point that hand dryers are inconvenient. They all claim they're very convenient on that silly generic sticker they have on them, but no! Do not let that fool you! It says they're always available, as one reason for this misguided convenience. But what if there was a power outage? Then how is that electrically generated low-pressure air stream going to be always available?

They also claim to create a cleaner bathroom area. And maybe that would be true if we were just looking at the paper towels that fall on the floor out of a trash can. But we have to take into account the water that splashes off people's hands and on to the floor creating not only water-y puddles, but kind of a hazard if people were to slip and fall. Also, people sometimes think these hand dryer things take too long, and so they leave the bathroom without drying their hands at all, and leave their wet hand prints all over the door. Lots of bacteria grows in water, I learned sometime in biology. That's the opposite of cleanly.

One of the other claims is that they prevent chapped hands. However, as stated above, people think these dryer things take too long to dry their hands. So they either leave before their hands are truly dry, creating lots of chapping, or they don't dry their hands at all, also creating chapping!

I'm supposing that the only for sure way to avoid having to use these dangerous/horrible inventions is to bring your own towel. A nice, soft, fluffy towel that makes your hands feel like satin. Because otherwise, your hands will die a slow and lonely death of chapped unhappiness. Poor hands.

PS: Hand dryers are LOUD. It's like, "I need to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night, and oh, let me just wake up the entire hallway while I turn on the hand dryer to make it's hideous noise!" That's no fun.