Sharon Kim Kim is a second-year biology
student. Send your rhyme or reason to skim@media.ucla.edu.
Click Here for more articles by Sharon Kim
Once in a while, if you’re lucky enough, you find yourself
stuck inside one of the bathroom stalls in Ackerman, staring at
your toilet a la bodily fluids, wondering why in the world the
toilet is not flushing.
No, it’s not because you don’t have the wits to kick
down the metal lever. It’s because the toilet you’re
staring at is automatic and is therefore supposed to flush on its
own. As a result, no lever!
Alas, the irony of it is the toilet only flushes at the moment
when you least want it. This is usually when you’re still
sitting down on the toilet seat that the toilet promptly flushes,
spraying watery unpleasantness on your ass and leaving you with
that not-so-fresh feeling.
Automatic toilets and faucets are a problem because they
aren’t sensitive enough to flush or turn on when you want
them to. Even more, water and energy is wasted during trials of
trying to get the contraptions to work.
Coupled with uncertain automatic toilets is the automatic
faucet. Automatic faucets might be useful if they actually worked
properly ““ you wouldn’t have to use your freshly washed
hands to turn off the faucet, and it eliminates the phenomenon of
careless people leaving the water on.
But for the gallons of water that is supposed to be saved with
these faucets, an equal amount is probably wasted by people trying
to get the damn things to work.
I’m talking about the faucet next to the wheelchair access
stall in Ackerman. You usually have to wave your hands under the
sensor a good five or six times to get the water to flow. But then,
when the water does turn on, you’ve taken your hand away. So
you place your hand back under the faucet. The faucet turns off.
You take your hand away. The water turns on. By now, you’ve
torn the faucet off from the counter in fury.
It might be better if sensors in the faucets and toilets were
re-engineered. Faucets can be made to be a bit more sensitive, and
toilets should flush about ten seconds after a disturbance in the
surface tension of the water in the bowl ““ perhaps a motion
sensor inside the bowl.
Currently, models of automatic toilets flush some seconds after
a body blocks the sensor next to this blinking red light for a
prolonged period of time. This is very unreliable because the
slightest body movement will set the toilet off. Once it flushes,
the toilet thinks there’s no one there and won’t flush
again for all eternity.
My friend complained once that you have to give the Ackerman
toilets a “damn lap dance” if you want them to flush. I
pointed out there’s a little black button you can press to
flush the toilet manually. But then I realized: what’s the
point?
Yes, there is a black button, but isn’t it more fun to
test the toilet and see if it flushes? What’s the point of
doing your business in an automatic toilet if it won’t flush
on its own?
It’s like trying to vacuum up a stubborn piece of lint
that the vacuum just won’t suck up. You pick up the piece of
lint and inspect it. You place it back on the floor. You swipe the
vacuum over the lint several more times. The vacuum is a
contraption that is supposed to pick things up. Even though I can
easily bend down and pick the lint up myself, I’d rather let
the vacuum do it. The same applies for an automatic toilet.
If you find yourself in a rut in front of one of those automatic
toilets again, be it in Ackerman or anywhere else, don’t
press the little black button, but try doing the following:
-Stare at the blinking red light.
-Say “open sesame!”
-Give the toilet a lap dance.
If all else fails, leave the toilet unflushed so the person who
goes in the stall after you can think you take pride in showing off
your feces.