Wet Hands // Bad Designs

Whoever designed this specific brand* of paper towel dispenser should be cursed with permanently wet hands.  They fathered an atrocity.  If you've ever used one, you will know.

Fuck this thing

These damn things always get stuck--they stop feeding out the towels.  To unstuck them you have to try un-jamming it with a small, plastic turn wheel that is inconveniently recessed in the plastic housing of the dispenser.  Most of the time, with your wet fingers and the machine's temperamental feed mechanism, you have no chance of budging it.  Even a person with relatively strong hands and fingers like myself has no chance.  Imagine the fun a person with arthritis must have trying to operate this.

Returning to the design, not only is the savior-wheel awkwardly placed, but it has nothing to firmly grip onto.  But even if it did, the wheel itself is so small--about two inches in diameter--that you have practically zero leverage.  Given that you only use the wheel when paper is stuck, the idea that you're gonna budge a jammed feed mechanism with wet hands, no grip and no leverage is absurd.

Nobody should have to titty-twister a paper towel dispenser, hoping they might actually get one.

When I use these things, I would generously estimate that they work half the time.  Now you might be thinking "it's no big deal--it's just a paper towel...#firstworldproblems."  But however small it is, it's enough to make someone's day just a little bit worse--to fire off some anger neurons.  And if fourty people using a public bathroom grapple with the same jammed dispenser, that adds up.  It's a lot of small disappointments to feed into the collective conscious--for no good reason.

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*It's a "Sanitouch" by Kimberly Clark