Hand Dryers are the Devil’s Bidets

Hand dryers are one of mankind’s worst inventions and they belong in hell to torment the hygienic quarter of the world’s deprecators, like politicians, serial killers, and cult leaders who wear too much white. If you walked into Ted Bundy’s house and had to use his bathroom while he sharpened all his knives, you would find that for all his faults, he would be only too gracious to let you wipe away your now-wet excrement.

The people who stock public bathrooms do not offer this level of brotherhood in the ways of sanitation. What they offer is a vacuous recreation of our bathroom rituals, an elaborate playhouse with plumbing and soaps and real flushing toilets, but not that last flicker of genuity that makes this phantom process become something real. WE NEED TO BE ABLE TO WIPE OUR HANDS. It is the climax through which our shame of languished filth is finally redeemed.

I do not need to describe the thrills and struggles of the bathroom process, it is a reclusive violence which unites us all. Whenever someone leaves the restroom, we pass along a solemn nod- they have returned from the Mirror Room, and for now, have left behind their demons. Some people do not survive this battle. Elvis Presley? Remember him? it could happen to you.

The least that we deserve are the candies we got as a child that conditioned us to stay vigil against this dire threat, to fight the Curse of Adam so that its pestilences could no longer threaten society. We don’t get those anymore, because the world is cruel, and we are taught eventually that we must suffer these things selfless and alone. But the least we EXPECT would be that after the sacrifices we make to keep our souls and bodies, not to mention the human race, functioning on the basic necessary level, that we should be rewarded with the opportunity to cleanse these sins, and what do they offer after the ceremonial ablution through which we reclaim the right to walk beneath the sun? A yawning metal orifice that spits wind at you.

There is at first reluctance because the thing is so loud that when you turn it on, you instantly believe that your existence was only a dream, and that you are about to wake up in pain to the whirling of choppers in a Vietnamese hospital. Your name is Brody Groteman, and a bullet wound to the left ventricle of your heart left you medically dead for three minutes. It’s a miracle that you survived, soldier, but we’re sorry to say that the bullet pierced your body completely, and then killed Buzz, your only brother. You roll your eyes back in your skull and return to the tiled shame cubicle, where the hand dryer WON’T. STOP. ROARING. Bathrooms are quiet, and these devices pillage every vestige there is in them for human comfort.

Not only that, but of course, the only thing they do is lie to you. Wash and lather, rinse and dry. The remnants of water for your filthy baptism are removed with the filth they dissolved, and banished to the bin. You thought it all came off with that last rinse? Well, I guess that means all paper towels must be clean then, right? Just rip them out the trash and use them to wipe your face at dinner. It’s FINE, because they’ve only got water on them, right? Water and soap? You disgust me. You know you’ll wash your hands all over again if you so much as brush yourself against someone’s discarded towel. They are as filthy as you are, when you dry your hands with a hand dryer. Instead of removing that final film of impurity from your wet flesh, you solidify it into the crusty remnants that a paper towel would otherwise have promised to remove. You have become a hypocrite. You leave the bathroom after this profane ceremony, and start touching phones, whiteboard markers, water coolers. If you took all the paper towels out of the bathroom and started maniacally wiping everybody and everything inside your office, you would only be committing the same crime. Close your eyes and you can hear the stirrings of the Bubonic Plague as it awakens once more in its deep, dark dungeons to whisper at rats and punish mankind for its hubris. When you shake someone’s hand after using a dryer, you can feel the rumbling hoofsteps of the Horsemen as they crawl from the earth’s primordial slime, ready to wipe the slate clean.

And what if there’s a blackout? If you took comfort from calcifying the filth on your wet disgusting hands to make them dry and disgusting, even this is now gone. You are then forced to do what, by all accounts, you should have done whenever you encountered one of these damn things, and wipe your hands against your shirt. Now your filth is deposited elsewhere on your body, but at least it’s contained, sealed away so that it can do as little harm as possible. Now the only person who has to worry about your toilet germs is the guy who’s gonna punch you in the stomach later at the bar. You have coated your body in secret, defensive poison. He’ll have a cold later. Won’t know why. Maybe he’ll die. Good for you.

The point is, a hand dryer is a cheat of the necessary and prudent process of hand washing. There is no replacement of this crucial final step. We wipe our hands on paper, or cloth, or the walls of the mad bathroom which excludes either, or we lie and ignite the dark oils of infection to lay their claim upon the world.

They are the anti-bidet. Bidets cleans our dry, dry buttholes with the soothing water, which of course would be expected to then be WIPED so that people would not look at our behinds and suspect diarrhea. Or maybe nobody wipes, and people in France all share a sense of common understanding that the wetness of one’s butthole is a scaling sign of cleanliness. Who knows what’s true? I am an American, and so other countries seem like other planets to me. Nonetheless, I am not a commercial Wet Wipes representative, and therefore do not need to constantly indignify myself by talking about my butthole to anyone who would listen, so I will suffice to say that bidets seem promising in theory, with a good wipe at the end.

But what God gave us in water, the Devil gave us in air- the empty promise that the breath of this machine will cleanse us will be the downfall of us all.

If you ever see a man beating a hand dryer with a baseball bat, leave him be. He is doing no more than what must be done to prevent every cell of Earth’s biosphere from withering to an onslaught of infection. Once the manager sees the confused pile of refuse where this monstrosity once laid its chin, he will have no choice but to put out napkins and one of the cashier’s trash bins. Therefore, humanity and all of its brothers and sisters will remain protected.