WEEKLY WHINE

Dare to be dry

So today I was in a bathroom, and as I was washing my hands, I found that they had provided two different ways to dry your hands. There was both a hot air dryer and a roll of paper towels. Blow air with a high saturation point of water past your hands in hopes that the water will evaporate, or move dry paper past your hands in hopes that the water will be absorbed into the paper.

The choice to be made is very important. Do you conserve paper, thereby wasting electricity, or do you conserve electricity, thereby wasting paper?

The consequences of this choice are critical. Undoubtedly Earth's resources are not being used in the most efficient way, but what is the best way to solve this? Do we make the move toward the long sought after paperless office, which requires generating copious amounts of energy to maintain the machines that contain the documents you need so that you can access them with the same reliability with which you could access paper documents? Or do we hold at the paperful office, which requires generating copious amounts of paper by destroying once plentiful forests and making it possible to wreak ecological havoc simply as a result of sheets of paper that are only used for a couple of minutes each?

The solution is not clear. Electricity and paper are both important commodities that have to be conserved, especially in the great state of California in which I live. Some of you are probably aware of the troubles that California is having with its electricity, namely that there isn't enough of it. Conversely, there appears to be plenty of paper to go around. But at what cost?

Paper, of course, consumes electricity to make, so the choice of consuming electricity and paper might seem to be lesser than that of consuming electricity by itself. However, electrically powered appliances are shipped in boxes made of cardboard, another flavor of paper. So you can either consume electricity and paper or paper and electricity.

Is either option particularly appealing? Or is it just an indication of the little room for imagination that this society has? There exists a demand for ways to dry people's hands in bathrooms, so it is filled. In this case it is filled by two different products, and you may choose one of the two. Or alternatively, the organization that runs the bathroom will choose one product for you, and you use it. You may complain that they don't have the product that you prefer, but few people have overwhelming preferences for either of these particular products.

Hasn't anybody come up with a way to dry hands that doesn't use paper and that doesn't use electricity? Or at least one that uses only one of the two alternatives? Or at least come up with a way to utilize something that already exists in bathrooms, like ceiling vents, to fulfill another function as well. Frequently these days, needs are fulfilled by new products, when reapplying an existing product could work just as well. Why does there need to be transparent tape, invisible tape, duct tape, electrical tape, packing tape, and athletic tape? One kind of tape could answer all of these needs. If somebody developed a waterproof duct tape, that would be the single übertape for all needs and purposes.

But having no überdryer available, I chose to waste electricity, just as you are now if you are reading this page on a monitor.