I’m young and consider myself to be ‘with it’. Yet I’m finding more and more often that modern technology is making a mockery of me.

Call me old fashioned, but I’m the kind of person who likes to do things for myself, rather than having something else do it for me. Simple things we all take for granted; like flushing the toilet, or helping yourself to paper towels from the dispenser.

As a young child on a trip to the USA I encountered one of the most unnerving experiences of my life: On the toilet in a state side airport I lent forward to tighten up my shoe and was unfortunate enough to have the toilet I was perched on flush automatically beneath me. A shock no six year old should have to under-go.

Even now, all too often I’m confronted not with a chain to pull or a lever to press, but with a small little sensor, looking alarmingly like a security camera, and a small notice telling me to waft my hand in front of it in order to flush. So I waft away and usually after 60 seconds of some serious wafting the toilet might decide to flush.

So it would follow that after I’ve washed my hand, with a lingering frown of confusion, under a magic tap which doesn’t need to be turned but somehow simply knows I’m there, that the towel dispenser would be technologically minded also.

So I stand there wafting my hand in front of it. Beneath it. And over the top of it. Only to have a highly amused teenager step up beside me and pointedly pull out a towel from the dispenser with his own hands. He smiles at me knowingly and walks off leaving me feeling rather foolish as I reach out and take a towel, the most energetic thing I’ve had to do since arrival.

I can’t help but think that those people who consider the general public as being unable to possibly cope with the complications of turning on a tap, but who could be considered quite grown-up enough to help themselves to paper towels, are missing a lever or two upstairs.

It would save us, the mentally challenged public,  a lot of embarrassment and grief if automatic equipment was installed either as standard, or not at all. This mish-mash of technology and tradition is no doubt the cause of a considerable amount of stress amongst modern man.

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