This is what I wrote about on a flight to Ecuador: Things that Don't Make Sense

I’m firmly convinced that those air hand-dryers in restrooms are a scam. There are several varieties of them—there’s the classic “Press Button, Receive Bacon” one, there’s the Dyson Airblade, there’s the one where you slowly pull your hands out, and the list goes on. Here are my grievances against them.

First of all, they’re pretty ineffective. Many of them automatically shut off after a specified length of time, and I’m all like, “Excuse me, my hands aren’t dry yet,” and then I begin another cycle. As a related sub-grievance, they take at least three times as long as using paper towels. Second, they’re really loud. When was the last time paper towels sounded like a leaf-blower in an enclosed space? Third, I think part of the marketed appeal of them to consumers is in their “more sanitary” nature over paper towels. I fail to see how a machine that blows water droplets from someone’s hand into the air is more sanitary than paper towels. Some of these machines—like the ones where you slowly pull your hands out—collect water at the bottom. That seems far more unsanitary to me: a pool of stagnant water congealing where you put your just-washed hands. (Also, why do people assert that paper towels are unsanitary? Paper towels come pre-packaged, so they’re sterile. In addition, you use them after you’ve washed your hands, so presumably, used paper towels might be some of the most sanitary things out there.) Fourth, I think another part of the marketed appeal is the claimed waste reduction—saving trees and whatever. Ok, sure, but each use of an electric hand dryer comes at the cost of burning coal to generate the electricity. Maybe the relative emissions from one use is less than the net negative effect of using three paper towels, but I somehow doubt that Dyson and other air-dryer manufacturers have actually studied and measured this. Once this is demonstrably shown, I’ll buy into the air hand-dryer craze. Until then, just compost your paper towels.

Of course, the probable reason these devices have become so popular is that you install them once and only need to pay attention to them when they break. With paper towel dispensers, you need to repeatedly monitor and replenish the supply. That’s labor, which is a cost. I doubt that many of the owners of these devices care at all about the four points listed above and instead care purely about cost.

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Growing up, my parents made us wash dishes in a way which I found puzzling even as a child. In an effort to save water, we only used the dishwasher’s “light wash” setting. Since that setting wasn’t very thorough, we had to rinse and lightly scrub everything before it went in the dishwasher to ensure that no residual food would remain after the cycle. This also meant that putting pots and pans in the dishwasher was out of the question. Such items required enough scrubbing to get the residual food off that it was basically already done. Also, they do occupy rack space pretty inefficiently.

This was silly. I’m pretty sure dishwashers were invented in the first place to make the process of washing dishes more efficient. Perhaps historically they used more water than handwashing did, and their appeal was merely the convenience factor (I’m looking at you, 1950’s); but given how market economies work, more efficient dishwashers would ultimately have had a competitive advantage over less efficient ones. And the fact that water-stricken states such as California don’t have strict dishwasher selection laws for building permitting leads me to believe that dishwashers don’t use more water than hand washing.

So the point of this vignette is that my parents were wrong, and dishwashers should be fully embraced and used to the fullest of their abilities. I will say, though, it is quite difficult unlearning all those years of “rinse then put in the dishwasher, but no pots and pans!” I almost always rinse my plates before putting them in; and I find myself leaving pots and pans in the sink to wash by hand later.

We Used to Mail out Anti-Abortion Propaganda.

There were at least two times at church that we were recruited to mail anti-abortion propaganda to companies that supposedly supported abortion.

Now, of course, there were so many things wrong with this, not the least of which was that we were doing this as part of an all-male church group. As if the world needed more men to make judgments about what women should and should not do.

The mailings were primarily testimonials from women who had had horribly botched abortions, or from women who regretted having their abortions. I must have folded hundreds of sheets of paper and stuffed hundreds of envelopes, but I never really closely read the contents on the paper. The only part I remember to this day was some woman who said that the doctor who was administering the abortion told her she could not move without tearing her cervix. It was (supposedly) a direct quotation from her, and it was in bold. I probably only remember that part because it was about where I would make the 1/3-page fold.

It was never stated how these companies we targeted “supported” abortion (Did they make corporate donations to Planned Parenthood? Did their CEO articulate personal pro-choice views? Did they recently begin covering birth control under their employee health insurance plan? Did they provide a limo service for women heading to/from the clinics?), but we didn’t think to ask such questions. Hell, who even were the companies we were contacting, anyway?

Our incentives for participating in this task are difficult to locate. We were promised free pizza and soda for lunch, but that by itself would not have been enough to motivate me if it were something I hated doing. That said, the food incentive was certainly non-trivial. I think another incentive was the promise of getting to spend time with friends from this church group. Spending four hours of a Sunday afternoon doing repetitive tasks can be enjoyable when you’re in good company. And I think there was a third incentive which was much more complicated. I think we all had some twisted idea that by participating in this effort, we would be able to change corporate altruism in a way that we had been brainwashed into thinking was moral. We were all good Christian boys who believed all the right things—including that abortion was a sin and needed to be stopped. This was a non-violent, “loving” way to do this.

I think I actually believed that my efforts would make a dent in the abortion rate. I had this silly notion that by doing this task, I was educating these “bad” companies. I thought that the readers of these letters would never have heard this perspective before, the perspective of women who wished they hadn’t gotten the procedure and statistics about failed abortions. How brainwashed these poor companies had been! Meanwhile, I’m sending off papers that I hadn’t even thoroughly read but fully expected other people to read.

The irony is so salient here.

I do wonder what happened to all those mailings. Did anyone read them, or were they immediately thrown out with the junk mail? And if they were read, who read them—the CEOs, the executive assistants, the receptionists, the interns? What were the readers’ reactions? Did they forward the mailings to anyone? Was anyone’s mind changed?

I know the answer to the last question. No.

Middle School Magazine Drive

There was the Magazine Drive at my middle school—an annual fundraiser where students sold subscriptions to a medium that was on death row.* Hindsight is always 20/20, so I now realize the exploitative nature of that fundraiser.** Effectively, the magazine publishers had recruited us as their sales departments and set up a bizarre commission structure.

I remember leafing through my mom’s Rolodex and cold-calling every single relative in it. I asked family that I hadn’t seen in months if they wanted to subscribe to Reader’s Digest or Smithsonian. Many relatives were extremely gracious and obliged me, saying that they had intended to renew a subscription anyway. Enough were gracious such that I was able to achieve the second-best prize.

The second-best prize—which students earned if they sold ten or more subscriptions—was a ride in a Hummer limousine.*** That prize was what motivated me to sell something that I cared nothing about. Seriously, what 12-year-old doesn’t want to ride in a limo? But wait, it gets better. The limo took us on a ride in the middle of the school day to…Burger King. Glamorous. It’s difficult to imagine what the DVC students working behind the counter must have thought when they saw a Hummer limo pull up around noon and twenty middle schoolers pile out. And then watched it happen at least five more times that day. Oh yeah, the second-best prize wasn’t all that exclusive. There were at least two limo trips for top sellers in my grade alone.

The top prize—which was awarded only to the absolute top seller in each grade—was thirty seconds or so in the “Money Booth”. This device resembled a phone booth made of a supporting frame covered by clear vinyl. Shortly after the student entered, it was turned on, and an upward stream of air began blowing dollar bills around the booth. The student attempted to grab as many bills as possible before the time limit expired. It was a bit challenging, as the floating bills were constantly darting around due to the air current. Realistically, it wasn’t possible to grab more than ten or fifteen dollars in the window of time that the machine was on.

So let’s think about this. A student sells ten subscriptions, and he or she gets a limo ride. Now renting a limousine ain’t cheap, but when each trip carts approximately twenty students at a time, the per-student cost is pretty low. Let’s hypothetically say the limo rental is $500/hour, and each student gets the one ride in that hour. Then the per-student cost is about $25. I have no idea what the magazine subscriptions I sold cost, but I can tell you that ten of them would far exceed $25. And the top seller, who probably had to sell far more than ten to smoke out the competition (because, again, what 12-year-old doesn’t want the chance to freely grab hovering bills?), typically only cost the program about $12.

This is what I mean by a bizarre commission structure. Not only were the forms of commission payouts really weird, but the students who did the magazine publishers’ dirty work were compensated woefully inadequately. But I guess the promise of items that are typically unattainable as a reward, even if the payout is low, is how you motivate kids to get into sales. Hell, maybe even adults too. If a telemarketing company had as a benefit “takes employees to Burger King for lunch in a limo”, I might actually rethink my career path.****

* It was the early-to-mid-2000’s; online print was well on its way to surpass physical print.

** And most other school fundraisers, really. Except the cookie dough fundraisers. Those things are the real deal. Like, they alone might be enough to convince me to move to suburbia one day.

*** This was when Hummers were in their heyday. If there’s one positive thing to have come out of the Great Recession of 2008, it was the decline of Hummers.

**** But actually, no.