how about it science?

This week at my new job as I was en route to the restroom, I was passing by the conference room and I noticed a ladder leading up to a missing panel. There were no people around. If you were me, you would have thought it would have been funny to move the ladder - perhaps a few panels down so that when the maintenance person came back from whatever ceiling related maintaining he (let's assume it was a he) was performing, he would look down the hole and discover his ladder missing. He would then see it a little ways away from him, or perhaps he would see a note stating the location of the ladder, and he would then have to crawl along the inside of the ceiling opening and closing panels, trying to figure out how he could get down from there, while you were sniggering inconspicuously in the corner. But then you would remember that you were the new employee in town and perhaps it was still a bit soon for practical jokes.

I proceeded to the little girls' room, only to find it closed, presumably by the same maintenance man who was wandering around in the ceiling. Why he couldn't go in another way - say, through the door - I don't know. Perhaps he was embarrassed by the prospect of having to go into the women's room when he was a man and so he opted to go in through the ceiling Mission Impossible style. I know nothing about maintenance, which is why I am just a lowly computer programmer.

Later in the day I found out the reason for the closure: an automatic hand dryer was being installed. It is one of those atomic ones that sounds like a jet engine and dries your hands in about three seconds. It's pretty cool.

I was thinking about this hand dryer and I realized something. Our bathrooms have automatic flush toilets, automatic facets and automatic soap dispensers. Even the door to the bathroom has one of those handicap buttons that I could conceivably hit with my knee or elbow. And now automatic hand dryers. The only thing left that I actually have to do myself is the locking and unlocking of the stall door. I'm not particularly germ-phobic, but I am kind of lazy so I was wondering if we couldn't make this an automatic process too somehow. Of course, I can see the potential problem of the door automatically opening on you while you were still doing your business. But, I think we have some pretty amazing technology out there right now, surely we should be able to overcome this problem.

Necessity, as you know, is the mother of inventions, so what I really need to find right now is an engineer with an extreme aversion to public restrooms, because all this manual opening and closing of stall doors is exhausting!