I hate hand dryers. You know the kind, the one’s you find in the rest rooms all around the world. You press a button, and it blows out hot air to dry your hands. Most public or private restrooms let you wash your hands with a certain amount of ease and proficiency. You can wash your hands, but what you can’t do is get them dry without wiping them on your pants. I understand the problem: the bathroom owners will pay for a little machine to dry your hands, and they will even pay for the electricity to run them, but they don’t want to buy paper towels of any kind or then collect the garbage to get rid of them. Garbage cans are so unsightly. The problem only starts when your hands are already wet and you want to dry them. The vast majority, if not all, of hand dryers do not work at all. They usually fall into a four categories of dysfunctional behavior. One, they don’t work at all–broken; two, they blow just a little bit as if there were an overworked hummingbird inside, and this has no effect of any kind on the moisture on your hands; three, the machine is supposed to function when you put your hands under it, but you can’t find the sweet spot where the machine turns on, or you find it, but it immediately turns off again–you play this game for a few minutes until you get tired of trying to guess where the sweet spot is; four, the machine does blow out hot air, but timidly, and this does not as much dry your hands as warm up the water still on them. The results of all of these machines are best described as pathetic or zero. I would suggest, in fact, that buying an automatic hand dryer is both useless and illogical because none of them will dry your hands. (I will not address the one company that makes a “blade” that really does dry your hands because they are so rare, like white tigers.) I have pressed the dryer button on more than one occasion to have the dryer come on and softly whine at me while it gently blows cool air on my hands. I can’t even count the times when the machines will not function at all, and you have to wipe your hands on your pants. What is a total mystery to me is how these businesses and engineers stay in business producing machines that don’t work. Many, many businesses have installed paper towel dispensers right next to the hand dryers (or removed the hand dryers entirely), so that their patrons can dry their hands without wiping them on their pants. Why, as users, do we tolerate such flimsy and faulty engineering? And how hard can it be to design a machine that works? The plain truth of the situation is that most hand dryers don’t work, and I mean 99% of them. I have laughed out loud when, with total innocence, I have put my wet hands under the dryer expecting to dry them, and nothing has happened, so I wipe them on my pants. So lately I always reach for the paper towel and leave the hand dryer clinging to the wall in mute silence, wondering which fool bought that thing thinking that it would dry hands.