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Ever gone in a public restroom and seen one of those new-fangled sensor-activated automatic devices? They range from toilet flushing to soap dispensing and everything in-between these days, but some of them make more sense than others. Here’s my analysis.

1. Automatic Sinks – Marginal Usefulness. People touch the sink fixtures before and after hand washing. Before doesn’t matter, because you wash your hands just after turning on the sink, but generally having to turn off the water means there’s risk of post-washing contamination. There are ways to turn off most normal sinks after hands-washing by means of arms, elbows, or feet, so this isn’t a complete necessity, but is still very useful. Also, these save water by only being on when used. Kudos.

2. Automatic Soap Dispenser – DUMB. What do you do after touching a soap dispenser? You wash your hands with the freshly-dispensed soap. Whatever it is you touch on the soap dispenser is pre-wash, and therefore irrelevant, just like turning on the sink. Do you touch a soap dispenser after washing your hands? No, because then you’d have to wash them again, and also you’d have to go back to kindergarten and learn how to wash your hands, because that is dumb. Automatic soap dispensers may save soap because they dispense in pre-determined amounts, but most that I’ve seen dispense too much. Also, since the hand-wavey thing doesn’t always work the way you expect, you generally waste water while waiting for the soap to come out, or look really stupid trying to push something on the dispenser to make it work. For these reasons, the automatic soap dispenser is basically completely useless and stupid.

3. Automatic Paper-towel Dispenser – OK. Though it is in a public restroom, and everything in a public restroom is probably nasty, we can safely assume that everyone who touches a paper-towel dispenser has very recently washed their hands. Therefore, it is relatively clean. Plus, a manual paper-towel dispenser allows more control over the size of the towel, allowing people with particularly large hands to easily get enough towel to dry them thoroughly. However, anything you touch in a restroom post-wash is probably a bad idea, so this still makes good sense.

4. Automatic Toilet Flusher – Good, but alternatives exist. This one’s pretty clear cut, especially for the men’s bathroom urinals (I am convinced I am the only person in the world who manually flushes urinals). This isn’t a big deal, since everything on or near the toilet is pre-wash, but anything on or near the toilet is also nasty-ass gross, and should avoid being touched at all costs. I say there are alternatives because the lever-type flushers can easily be activated by foot, and there are also floor-based flushers that are designed exactly for that, and your shoes are pretty much dirty the moment you set foot in the restroom. However, the simple fact that these devices force everyone to flush whether they like it or not make the case.

5. Automatic Door Opener – Maybe sweet? (But these don’t exist, or if they do I haven’t seen one). This leaves us with the final post-wash activity – opening the door. Personally, I think all restrooms should be push-to-exit with a metal foot panel, but since that’s not how rooms are designed (for good reason) you usually have to pull. If you’re smart and obsessed with cleanliness (and the bathroom isn’t one of those without paper-towel dryers) you can use the paper towel as a hand-guard on the bathroom door, open it, catch it with your foot, roll up the paper towel into a little ball, go for the two (or possibly three) pointer off the wall into the trash can in the corner, open the door the rest of the way with your foot, and continue on your way. Don’t forget the rebound if you miss the trash can shot—leaving it on the ground just isn’t cool in any bathroom, and if you miss that shot, you give up your rights to cleanliness anyway. For shame, for shame. But how cool would it be if the door were Star Trek style and just slid open when you approached it (complete with accompanying woosh sound)? Of course, this doesn’t apply for single-accoutrement bathrooms—you don’t want the door opening randomly while you’re on the can. This one will have to be thought through by someone with much more bathroom-fixture-design experience than I, and hopefully not by the guy who invented the automatic soap dispenser.