Our Legless Masters

We have paper towel dispensers at work that are "hands free." What that means is the machine is supposed to automatically know, by your body language and proximity, that you want some paper to dry your hands with. At which point it spews out about a foot of said paper.

Now, because machines can't actually read our minds yet (or most of them, anyway), you can probably guess that this product doesn't always work as designed. I have seen them dispense paper when no one was anywhere near. And they rarely work the way I think anyone wants them to.

The towel dispenser is an Unknown Quantity. The paper it provides is like rain for our crops. We need it, we know that it will come at some point, but we do not know when, and we're not sure that anything we do makes a difference. And so, like peoples of old (and not so old) did when confronted with such engimas, we have developed our own little rituals to somehow give us the illusion of control over the Uncontrollable. The employees here have developed bizarre little gestures and dances that they use to invoke the machine's dispensing power. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don't.

I have seen hopping and swaying before the box. There has been pointing, jerking, waving, and thumping. None seem to work more than any other, but they all do eventually work, if the supplicant is devoted and patient enough. Just yesterday, I saw a woman in the break room smiling and waving at the box with such friendly zeal that I was convinced she was looking at someone in the reflected metal face of the dispenser. But no. She was just trying to coax paper out.

I am not immune to this instinct, though I favor more of an "oppressive loom", rather than a less dignified wave or shake. I have to let the thing know that even though I am beholden to it for certain services, I will not be cowed by it. That, if I really wanted to, I could rip the thing from the wall and tear out its papery entrails with my bare hands.

I usually get the paper I need.