Flushed with Annoyance

I will never understand or approve of auto-flush toilets. Nasty little beasts.

My office installed them last year, and they continue to annoy the … well … crap out of me. The one in the first stall is an aggressive flusher. Walk by the door, it flushes. Walk in the stall, it flushes. Sit down and lean forward a bit, and it flushes. Then again when you stand up, again when you bend over to pull up your pantyhose and a final time when you open the door in a snit. If you open the door too wildly in an effort to escape the incessant flushing and the door bangs open and then closed, it will flush AGAIN, with a “good riddance!” flourish.

And everyone looks at the crazy-mad flusher as she flees the restroom in a huff.

But that’s not the worst part. It’s the butt misting I can’t stand. If you do anything to activate the flushing when you’re sitting, you get a fine piss mist of all your own output along with a sprinkling of whatever germs linger from the previous visitor. Lovely. One feels SO fresh.

I can’t imagine that these trigger-happy flushing mechanisms are saving the company any money with all the water they waste. It’s like low-flow toilets — where are the savings if everyone flushes two or three times for adequate water flow? No more than the auto-dispensing soap squirters by the sink are saving on the expense of suds despite the fact that they dispense a half-thimbleful of soap per use, since I sometimes hear them squirting off into the sink when there is, technically, no one in the immediate vicinity. What’s setting them off — a cloud of mist from the toilet stall area?

Or maybe they’re set off by the hand motions of annoyed people gesturing in indignation about the toilets.