Wednesday, February 25, 2009

Updates to bad bathroom behavior and dead batteries


After I wrote this about the annoying habit of some to use their paper towels to open the bathroom door to protect themselves from deadly viruses, I happened to find a copy room that for some reason had three trash cans. So I placed one of them just outside the bathroom door so that both men and women who are terrified of touching door handles have someplace to put their brave towels.

And it has worked pretty well. Until I saw this today. How can someone miss the trash can from such a point blank distance? (Probably the same way an eight-foot-tall basketball player can miss a dunk.)

I know I know - baby steps. 

Remember the two times I left the lights on and ended up with a dead battery in the Race Car? And how I was determined to install an after-market buzzer thing to reduce the chances of this happening again? Well, I still haven't gotten around to doing that.

But I did do something else. The interior light would not come on when the driver's door was opened. Mrs Notthat pointed out that this was inconvenient. So I played with this a bit and "fixed" it by just pushing the button that the Race Car uses to figure out if the door is open about a thousand times. This cleans the contacts in the switch (sort of) and ended up making it so that the interior light reliably came on when the door was opened.

That was a couple of weeks ago. A couple of nights ago Mrs Notthat and The Boy came in from driving the Race Car and said that it turns out that the car already has a "lights on" warning buzzer sort of thing. Obviously I called them both liars, but then it dawned on me that the same switch that tells the car that the door is open for the interior light would also be used to tell it that I'm about to do something stupid if the lights are still on.

I think this makes me a genius by fixing two problems at once, but I'm not sure it counts if I didn't know I had fixed one of the problems due to it never occurring to me that they were related.

That's it - move along...

2 comments:

mary ann said...

Oh, I think you are a genius indeed. And the whole bathroom thing is still a puzzle ~ I always wonder if it's some sort of passive/aggressive thing.

DAK said...

OK, I'll admit to you that I wonder about touching doorhandles to bathrooms in airports. Think of ALL the International Cooties that could be lurking there. And what about the one on the airplane washroom that you have to wrestle with to unlock after you've disabled the No Smoking Indicator?