Monday Rant: Hand Dryers

Many washrooms in institutions (schools, government edifices, large corporations) are equiped with hot-air blow dryers for the purpose of drying one's hands after washing. I actually like the concept, since paper towels inevitably lead to both lamentable waste and overflowing garbage cans.

Simply having such a device present is insufficient, however. There are issues of positioning, quantity, and air-flow characteristics to be considered, all issues that the people who construct men's rooms seem unaware of.

Positioning: Here at SFU, in the Biological Sciences department, there is a men's room with the sole dryer placed next to one of the urinals. If a man pees at that particular urinal, the automatic, motion-sensing blow dryer will run for the duration of his visit, and it becomes impossible for anyone else to dry their hands. This is fucking stupid - who built that?

Quantity: Question: if you place 4 sinks in a washroom, how many dryers should you put in? I'm going to go with at least THREE, rather than the ONE common in many 4-sink washrooms around here. Is there no expectation of a correlation between WETTING hands and DRYING hands?

Volume: Blow dryers work by BLOWING AIR. There are many pathetically feeble dryers about campus here (and elsewhere) that emit a lame, barely-detectable puff of air. This is supposed to speed evaporation from skin how, exactly?

Temperature: Air will hold more dissolved water at higher temperatures - so why do so many blow dryers produce air at the same temperature as the rest of the room? Gimme some heat, here, man!

Perhaps, somewhere, a person with restroom-construction-and-layout responsibilities will read this, and take heed. Until then, I need something to sop the water out of my keyboard.