Irrelevance Glorified

(note : originally written in 1999)

I believe that the designers of these push-faucets meant well. They sleep well at night, believing themselves to be saving the environment and maybe even some baby seals or something. However, this invention has gone horribly wrong.

My main gripe is that they don’t do what they intended to do, which is save water while at the same time convenience me. It is only on rare occasions that I have not been inconvienced by them, due to the fact that there can only be a slim deviation in the amount of time in which the water must stay on before it just makes me angry. Two things invariably happen: the water stays on too long or it stays only a fleeting moment.

In the first case, I’m often done washing my hands, drying them, fixing any deficiencies in my apparel like an undone zipper or improper tuckedness of the shirt, and yet the torrent from the faucet is still coming. There needs to be some sort of switch that I can hit that will just stop the water when I’m done, because in many cases the water is still running when I leave the lavatory and for all I know, may be continuing to flow for some time after I leave. I could probably graduate from the University, get married, have kids, have grandkids, and then invite the little buggers down to Grandpa’s Alma Mater to see the eternal faucet.

The other extreme is when the faucet turns off very quickly. Sometimes I push down on the tap and the water is off before I can get my hands under the water. Coincidentally these are often the faucets that require the most effort to push down, so I feel like a modern age Sisyphus just washing my hands. The only solution is to lather up with the soap, then use one soapy hand to hold down the tap while I rinse the other hand, then switch hands. Of course, when I switch hands, the tap gets all soapy and makes my perfectly rinsed hand soapy, and I have to repeat the process for a while to complete the job. In other words, I often use more water than normal.

Once again, I have to commend stupid people for leaving the water on in enough places in enough times to warrant the evil invention of the push faucet.

P.S. I just got back from Europe, so I thought that I’d add something that I do approve of : push showers. These are showers where you press a button to get 10-20 seconds worth of water at a time. I think these are great. You don’t get to adjust the pressure that much, but you save massive amounts of water because you just use push to wet yourself down, then you can lather up to your hearts desire and use two or three pushes to rinse yourself off. It also helps during those days when you just can’t get your sleepy self out of the shower. — 07/05/01