Saturday 13 November 2010

Auto-Soap Dispenser

OK, I have a confession to make: I am someone who rants.

To anyone who knows me this is like me admitting that I breath, or that I eat, or that Justin Bieber is really creepy (seriously, what the hell is going on there?) but as no-one who knows me (or anyone else at the time of typing for that matter) is reading this I'm going to put this out there. While I am incredibly patient with some things there are other things for which I have no patience whatsoever.

For instance: A baby grabs my nose and decides that it's a fun toy with which to play.

I'm OK with that. It might not be particularly comfortable but the baby seems to be enjoying it and it's not really doing me any harm so go for it baby. I'll even throw in some amusing noises while you do that. Go ahead, knock yourself out (not literally hypothetical kiddo; we don't want you getting hurt), carry on. You'll get bored with this before I will because you're a baby. It's not like you're doing this to annoy me. You're just, well, being a baby. As "being a baby" is not something you can help I have all the patience in the World for you.

By contrast: Coldplay exist.

Quite reasonably this fact reduces me to a seething mass of fury.

However I am not here to discuss this. Not on this occasion. Oh no. On this occasion I am mentioning something that I have spotted more recently and that annoys the crap out of me.

Auto-Soap Dispensers.

"What are Auto-Soap Dispensers?" You may ask. "Why do they annoy you so?" You may go on to ask. "Are you going to tell us or just carry on with the build-up like some overly-verbose, pretentious, asshat?" You may continue.

Steady on.

That over there (→) is a picture of a box of Auto-Soap Dispensers as I am sure you can all work out from the words that are photographed on the box itself. You may be wondering exactly what is wrong with this product. Of course you may already have worked that out and if that's the case, well done you, keep it quiet until I've finished.

What is wrong with this product is that it is being sold as an aid to hygiene. Now you may argue, as the manufacturer does, that being touch free, it does not help to spread anything via a transmission route. "Lack of touching things must be a good idea" some might say.

This would be all well and good but for the fact that you wash your hands after you've obtained the soap. It doesn't actually matter all that much if you're touching the soap dispenser as that happens before you're clean. And you can push a soap dispenser with something that hasn't come into contact with whatever you've been handling anyway.

You know what helps with this problem? Something that helps you to not touch the taps. Elbow taps are one solution (beloved of laboratories but not so common outside of these environs in my experience) as are touch-free taps (with motion sensor technology THAT ACTUALLY HAS A USEFUL PURPOSE) but they're not that common, and seriously, you can just install elbow taps.

If anyone falls for this product then there's a very good chance that they'll not pay attention to the transmission routes that they're supposed to be avoiding (so they end up giving, for example, that innocent, nose-grabbing, hypothetical baby something from handling raw meat, getting something on the tap, washing their hands and then getting that something back on their hands to poison the hypothetical baby) as their wonderful Auto-Soap Dispenser has supposedly protected them from harm. Only it hasn't protected them. The lack of care resulting from a false sense of security actually causing a problem.

WAY TO HELP SPREAD DISEASE AND FILTH YOU SUPPOSED PROTECTORS OF HYGIENE.

This kind of crap really does piss me off.

As most of the people that I talk to have eyes that tend to glaze over when I talk about stuff like this I am hurling it at the internet on the grounds that getting it off my chest might make me feel a bit better.

Let's see how that works out.

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