Dry humour
Like any sane human being, I’ve always regarded all automated machines with a healthy mixture of fear and suspicion. I believe it is with this same healthy mixture of fear and suspicion that any Neolithic bird would have regarded our early simian ancestors. They would have known, as much as we know about the machines, that this is the species that will fuck it all up.
But there is one class of machines that I look upon not with a mixture of fear and suspicion but with irritability. Of the many inventions created solely with the object of amplifying human displeasure, the automated hand driers will come second, just before conferencing software (‘Hello, can you hear me? Yes, I can…. Ah you can’t? Must be a network issue. No, I can hear you, you moron! What the hell!’) and immediately after ATMs (“I am sorry. I can only tell you how disappointingly low your balance is, but I can’t give you any money.”).
Designed by the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation, that same blighted company that made the Nutrimatic drinks dispenser that flummoxed Arthur Dent, the automated hand drier seems to have been designed to almost but not quite entirely not dry your hand.
This is how the machine operates.
Nature calls and you rush to the toilet to answer it before the call goes to the answering machine.
You have a discrete conversation with nature, lasting a few seconds if the call was about the excess coffee you drank or a few minutes, perhaps even an hour if it was about last night’s biryani.
The micturitions, exudations, and flatulences result in an embarrassing symphony.
You finish the call and try to sneak out the door. But you see that there are other people around which compels you to maintain acceptable standards of hygiene.
You slink to the wash basin avoiding all eye contact.
You wash your hands. If the washbasin has one of those infernal automated taps, you nervously giggle and wave your hands like an awkward stick figure trying to play an ill-tuned theremin. At some point, when you ar least expecting it, the water comes out and you end up getting your glasses, trousers, purse, and wrist wet anointing the divine quartet of spectacles, testicles, wallet, and watch.
You shake your hands, literally, off the entire matter of hygiene and approach the tissue paper dispenser.
Only there is no tissue paper dispenser.
Instead, there is a rather smug-looking hand drier. It hangs off the wall dripping judgment with every inch of its smooth surface.
Depending on what flavor of masochism that washroom has chosen, your drier is either a machine that hangs above expecting you to hold your hands up in abject supplication or one that hangs below ominously asking for your hands to be pushed into cavities that look like a merciful guillotine designed to merely amputate and not decapitate.
You hold up or push your hands in and wait.
Nothing happens.
Nothing… happens.
The same machine that seemed to function flawlessly for the man who dried his hands just before you stays as still as a suicidal rabbit on the highway trying to get run over by a truck.
You move your hands here and there gently, suggesting to the machine that you expect them to be dried.
The machine responds with a censorious hum that lasts barely a microsecond.
“Not worthy”, the machine says.
The general feeling of being an utter failure in life coupled with this pathetic rejection from a machine sends waves of anxiety down your spine.
You flail your hands about.
“Sorry, I don’t dry hands that thrash around like severed lizard tails.”
You try to move your hands slowly as if to tell the machine “See, these are hands. They are covered in skin and have hair on them. There are two of them with five digits. Ergo human hands. And they are dripping water. Ergo they are wet. Ergo they can be dried. Now please dry them.”
“Nice try. But I don’t try human hands that look like lizard scales. Have you heard of this amazing invention called hand lotion…?”
You try to now move your hands rapidly, speed of light, now you see it, now you don’t, hoping that you can trick the machine.
“Ah, nice try. I could have dried your hands actually, you know? You moved them so fast that I didn’t have to see their ugliness. But, unfortunately, ” the machine takes on a Snape-ian drawl from hereon “I can still smell. Maybe you can try after you’ve dabbed an entire bottle of perfume… or a hundred perhaps?”
You give up insulted. And your hands have dried anyway from the general waving about.
And just as you prepare to draw your almost dry hands away, there is a blast of hot air, drawn from the very depths of Dante’s Inferno.
As you scream in pain and draw your hands back, you hear the machine whisper in a sinister voice.
“I am the way into the city of woe,
I am the way into eternal pain,
Divine omnipotence created me,
Abandon all hope you who wash here”
You exit the bathroom door totally insulted and defeated.
Epilogue:
I believe the singularity has already happened and the machines have a shared consciousness. I had to use the toilet after having written this at work and was confronted by a new mutant malformation. A tissue paper dispenser operated by a wave of your hand.
The expression on its face was unmistakable. It might have as well said the below in plain English.
“I read what you wrote about my friend. Now not only will you be judged and insulted, but you will then have to the drying yourself.”
It could have been the day when humanity died ignominiously at the hands of technology. It could have been the day when the courage of men failed, and we forsook our friends and broke all bonds of fellowship.
But it was not that day.
I coolly pulled out a handkerchief from my pocket, waved it with nonchalant indifference in the machine’s bewildered face, and dried my hands.
