They are bloody hopeless aren’t they?

I mean, you wash your hands and rinse off the soap so that they’re properly wet.  You sashay over to the dryer and hold out your hands, hoping to have them dried.  What you actually get is 2 minutes of a weak, wheezy attempt by the asthmatic motor which merely redistributes the water droplets on your hand, rather than driving them off into the atmosphere.

So you attempt to start the infernal machine again, but of course it’s tired itself out with all that heavy breathing, so something inside it says, ‘no, I’m afraid you’ll have to wait.’  So you give your hands another shake and put them back underneath the vent.  Again, nothing happens, so you quit the scene, muttering grumpily to yourself.  (The fact that the next thing you touch with your clean, if wet, hands is the door handle that countless dirty gets who didn’t bother to wash their hands have also touched is the subject of another blog post…)

They are so bad, that I remember one colleague of mine who after washing his hands would shake them vigorously for the odd second, virtually run up to the drier, flap his hands underneath it, thus forcing it to switch itself on for the briefest of brief moments and then quit the washroom, running maniacally back to his desk to complete the job on the latest carefully crafted piece of work that one of his minions had probably spent hours over.

Our good friend Sir James Dyson has obviously been so miffed by his experiences at trying to have his hands dried for him that he has come up with his blade drier and this actually works a lot better.  You can actually see the skin on your hands moving as the much better targeted jet of warm air does the job that it’s designed for.  Of course, one thing that Sir James cannot compete with is the address of one of the other providers of sanitary hot air driers.  I won’t mention the name, I’d only embarrass them, but they are (or at least were) located at Honeypot Lane in North London.  Great business address, shockingly bad hand driers.