No escape

One of the positives from the covid pandemic is a lot of bathroom doors can be opened with your foot now.

Also the return of paper towels for hand drying.
I hate those stupid air dryers. Most of them barely do any better than just shaking your hands in the air, because they’re simply spraying your clean hands with all of the shit and piss particles that are floating in the air.
Would rather have some cheap paper towels so I can dry my hands, and use the towel to open the door before throwing it in the trash.
- Additionally, my understanding is that a lot of the cleaning done by washing your hands is mechanical, and using a paper towel with a slightly rough and absorbent surface scrapes off all the stuff that has been loosened by washing with soap and water.
- Most of them barely do any better than just shaking your hands in the air,
  I saw one of these once where someone scratched "4. wipe hands on pants" on the instruction panel.
  The trick is to shake dry in the sink, then rub the moisture up past your wrists onto your forearms, creating a thin layer. Then use the dryer, repeating the rubbing motion spreading the moisture out until it's gone.
  because they’re simply spraying your clean hands with all of the shit and piss particles that are floating in the air.
  This is the real problem. Apparently, the Dyson air blades are the worst: https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/04/dyson-dryers-hurl-60x-more-viruses-most-at-kid-face-height-than-other-dryers/
- At my work there was a trash can just under the water fountain between the two doors of the bathroom. perfect design.
- The only dryers I like are the Dyson ones the air blade ones.
I haven't ever seen a door like that, except in hospitals. I wish they'd become more popular in my area
Those foot pull hooks are useful, but I have yet to figure out how to get out the door without an awkward shuffle step or downright stumble as I pull the door open.
- Open the door with your foot, hold it with your elbow.
.
Not everyone is able to not skip leg day.

Seriously though, one of my biggest pet peeves is when they get every other aspect of touch-less design correct, and then fail with the door.

#designfails

Or when the soap dispenser is touchless but not the tap.
- That’s solved with getting extra soap, scrubbing the tap, rinsing the tap with water when you rinse your hands.
  The door thing is still the biggest
- As long as there's paper towels you can lather, wash, dry with a clean paper towel, and then use that to turn off the faucet/open the door without touching them. It sounds germophobic, but it really is the best way for us to use public restrooms and protect each others' health.
The best design is no door. You walk in and around a corner / wall.. Think airport.
My understanding (which may be false) is that this can come about from competing design considerations and regulations. Like... It's ideal to be able to push the door open from the inside of the bathroom so you don't have to touch a nasty doorhandle, but you also don't want somebody to be able to put something in front of the door, potentially trapping you in the bathroom (particularly in the event of a fire... Dying in a fire is probably worse than touching a nasty doorhandle), and you also don't want doors to unexpectedly swing open into busy hallways. This drives me nuts too, though.
- Eh, there's an easy solution that a lot of places are starting to use. A foot pull. Probably costs $5-10. No real excuse for any place not installing these.
- How about a door that swings both way
- A handle you can hook your arm around would solve this.
- In some restaurants I've seen double swing doors on the toilet entrance.
Touchless booth door but then its occupancy detector is faulty ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡ °)
- Don't think you need it that much. You're going to wash your hands after. There's a small chance you could contract something before using the bathroom from it, unsure on the likelihood of that transmission.
Given that it has a blow dryer instead of paper towels I doubt the door handle is an issue

Why don't more doors have foot pedals? I saw them in a mcdonalds and now I'm wondering why t f they aren't everywhere

I'm seeing them More and more. They aren't expensive either.

Easy. Just lick the door handle 3 ~ 4 times to clean it so that you don't need to get your hands dirty.

That’s how I do it and I’ve only had Covid 5 times! Works like a charm.
Yup! You also sometimes get free nutrients on the door handle ☺️
I see you also have a toddler.

I just grab the handle using my butt cheeks.

Omega Brain over here, making us feel dumb.

Don't those blowers spread way more germs than just using a paper towel?

Yup: https://health.clevelandclinic.org/the-dirty-truth-about-hand-dryers

The sensors aren't there for your convenience to turn them on, they are there to save the business money by turning them off.

It can be both.
Mechanical/timer versions with auto-shut-off of all of these exist, but you have to touch those.
- I don’t like those mechanical/timer ones. Especially the ones with a push button top, always felt like I had to smack the button several times just to get twenty seconds of water.
Yeah, businesses hate it when you leave the soap on.
- Portion control.

Those dyson.airblade urinals are typically so messy that they defeat the purpose of touch less.

Please stop peeing on those. They are not actually urinals.
- Listen, superchief. If I piss in it it's a urinal.
- But... they're too high to poop in... 🤔

My favourite is the kind of S curve that some places have, so you just walk in, but it's private enough that people can't just leer from the hallway or whatever I'm not actually sure what we're accomplishing with doors here unless it's a very tight space I guess like if the bathroom is near the area where patrons eat at a resto? Yeah I get that, door away. Sorry for rambling.

I worked in an office that had the S curve bathroom and I do not recommend it. People who sat on that side of the floor got to hear the air dryer every time someone used the bathroom. Also, the smells... Automatic door openers are the answer.
- I went to college the S curves, as well as one office briefly before the pandemic, but they were both off the "main drag" by a bit. Like along a hallway that didn't have people just sitting nearby.
  As is eternally the case, location matters
- Smells?? Seems like bad exhaust system

Sometimes a trash bin is located near the door, so I'll use the same paper towel I used to dry my hands to open the door, hold the door open with my foot, then throw the paper towel in the bin. But these make hygiene so much easier:

The Step n' Pull should be standard.

Need those foot handles to kick the door open. God bless establishments that have installed them.

Otherwise, I roll my sleave over my hand and pull the door open. Especially in restaurants.

I don't like the sleeve method. Grime just hangs out on your sleeves and then gets deep in the fibers. No thank you. I use my pinky and ring fingers when I absolutely have to.
- Pinky and ring finger for me too!
The step n pull was actually a shark tank product

A hobby of mine is to get annoyed at hand dryers. 80% of the models I find are eyerollingly useless. Blow a faint breeze for five seconds, stop and refuse to trigger again no matter how much you try to slap the air in front of it.

Then there are those 5% that actually gets it. Blowing a jet stream that makes the water droplets sublimate so fast you forget you even washed.

Small thing, sublimation occurs when a solid converts immediately to a gas with no liquid state between. This happens with dry ice commonly
They all just blow hot germs around though.
- Also they are way too fucking loud. Just use paper, people.
the dyson airblade v is good
- Yup, although it can also have a tendency to stop after a few seconds and refuse to elaborate.
I keep thinking it'd be a good idea to patent a hand dryer that points the detector in one direction and the blower in another, such that to switch it on you have to move your hands out of the air stream, and to switch it off you have to move your hands into it. Your hands get dry not by the blower, but by the action of moving your hands to and fro between the detector and the blower.
Nobody would object or claim prior art because that would put them on record as directly admitting their products are shit.
Then sue everyone whose hand dryers do exactly that. I'd make a killing.

Easy, just open it with your teeth, then your hands will stay clean.

There are add on "foot handles" that sort this out, but they are pretty uncommon.

Yeah, I just ran ino this for the first time a few days ago by coincidence. I guess it works and makes sense. A little awkward and won't work for everyone, but maybe the best solution

When they have paper towels, what I do is take the last one with which I dried my hands to grab or pinch the door handle and pull.

The shopping mall where I live has the metal stripe at the bottom that's clearly there to protect the door when you open it with your shoe... But they open inwards to the bathroom.

Hand driers that use air increase "germs" on your skin. Paper towels reduce them.

If there are no paper towels I use toilet paper. Last time I used a public restroom I dried my hands on my pants.

There is a lot of fear-mongering and misinformation about paper towels vs air dryers. Paper towels are marginally more hygienic because air dryers spray the particles off your hand into the air. Neither are a good option if you don’t wash your hands well to begin with.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2019/apr/25/hand-dryers-paper-towels-hygiene-dyson-airblade
I dont know if this has been definitively proven as last I heard the studies that reflected this were paid for by paper manufacturers.
- They tested this on Mythbusters and found air dryers to be unsanitary.
- The big-paper-towel psyop
Can also use the paper towel to open the door on your way out.

Spit on it and pull. Spit kills everything, right?

Geez, I hope not.
We'd run out of pornstars!
- Oi vey
Apparently saliva does contain some antimicrobial enzymes who knew.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysozyme
- See, my Mom knew when she'd try to clean my face after licking a cloth.

I grab it with the edge of my shirt. While it's not ideal, my shirt will be washed later and it spares me having to deal with risk of fecal particles on my hands where they can immediately reach my face.

It's strange that automatic doors are standard on the outside of just about every shop, but nobody has ever thought to put them indoors.

Because it's an extra expense, not just to install but to maintain. They put them on the exterior door because it lets people in faster and easier (more customers) and is easier to haul out your purchases when you leave so you are encouraged to buy things without thinking as much about logistics. Bathroom doors being automated vs manual is almost never going to affect sales.

Yeah, this drives me crazy. Best thing I can do if I have a jacket or long sleeved shirt on, is to put my hand inside the sleeve and open it that way

Sometimes the toilet god is merciful and someone comes in at just the right moment.

I just use my shirt tail or sleeve, haven't opened a door with my.bare hand since February 2020. (Yes I do realize COVID isn't spread by touching really but if it's one less risk I can take along with masking I will do it).

Ha! Amateur! I haven't opened a toilet door with bare hands since the time they wrote a "19" at the beginning of the year. Git gud! (I'm not entirely sure, but could actually be true)

The correct way to handle this would be to use a disposable paper product. Most places still have a paper towel dispenser along side the air hand dryer, you're supposed to use that.

Besides the point, most people don't know how to properly wash and dry their hands. There's a technique to both that actually improves cleanliness a lot and reduces overall waste.

I never use air based hand dryers. Paper towel for life. Some places use maze patterns instead of doors, which I generally like but usually requires some extra work with air handling to make sure the bathroom air stays in the bathroom, and a bit more floor space to provide the room for the maze pattern. Those restrooms are usually the ones without paper towel, I don't mind, I just have moist hands for a few minutes afterwards.

All of this can be googled. So I won't go into more detail, but the majority of people couldn't possibly give fewer fucks about handwashing or hand drying properly. So I expect most won't even try to learn how to do things better, ever. They just go with whatever their parents taught them as a child and never question it again. Bluntly, your parents probably did the same, so you're probably working off of 50+ year old advice on hand washing.

Yes, yes and yes. Do you also do laboratory work? Ive always found these hygiene important but, now i notice how nasty all things get since ive started doing lab work and especially when working with diseases
- Nope, I'm an IT guy with a nurse for a wife. I've taken first aid (including proper handwashing) for about 30 years being a member of St. John's ambulance for a long time in there.
  It's been beaten over my head for most of my life. Looking into it, the rabbit hole goes deeper. I also found a TED style talk (may have been TEDx? I forget) talking about the best way to dry your hands while using as few paper towels as possible.
  I know I've only really scratched the surface with what I could know on the topic. I also understand that there's helpful "germs" on your skin, and over washing or over use of hand sanitizer can be detrimental to skin health and long term health; of course with a huge number of caveats that are just so far outside of the scope of what I'm trying to say.
  Looping back on topic, I'm a science nerd, first-aid trained, very curious and knowledge seeking individual with a large exposure to medical people. Hygiene is very important.

I was just thinking about that very problem the other day.

Use your dick, it's dirty. You were washing your hands because you touched it, no?
- My problem: none available 😄
- Ah so use dick to open door. I shall give it a go!

I use my foot

How do you pull with your foot? Toes out?
When the door has that little foot puller at the bottom 🤌

Elbows, anyone?

Good luck pulling a door handle with elbows
- Pffft, can and have.

Kick it

And if it opens to the other side - just kick it harder.
- Don't know about other countries, but in Poland all public spaces have to have doors opening to the outside.

This is why I just wrap my scrotum around the handle to open it, problem solved

What about the foot puller thingy

Let's normalize revolving doorways into bathrooms

They don't have paper towels, they have a funny air blower…
That's what I usually do 😅

And it's a pull door

Most restroom doors are.
Because they typically open into a hallway, and you don't want doors swinging open into the hall.

There is always going to be a door handle where ever you go. The next pull door after the toilet is always gonna be the grossest.

Foot handles are a thing that keep popping up in public places. Nice to see. Could seriously spare a lot of cross contamination.

Burn the toilet down

At all times, gentlemen, have some old workshop towel or used tissues in the depths of your pockets.

And what about the part of your pants you grab to pull them up before washing your hands?

They never said they pulled up their pants before washing their hands. Lol

Unless you're immunocompromised, is this really worth worrying about?

Yes. It's one of the biggest vectors for contagions. But since disease takes a while to become evident, most people don't associate their sickness with the actual source of transmission.
- Bathroom doors specifically, not just doors in general? Edit: I looked it up and I guess it's about bacteria like E. Coli, that makes sense. It's weird, because people on Reddit/Lemmy always talk about using these tricks to avoid touching things, but IRL I've never seen anyone do it or heard anynone talk about it

I just stand inside the door until someone else comes in, then escape.

This works poorly in remote areas, but I consider 4 days trapped in a public bathroom worth it to avoid touching the poop handle.

Lots of places now have automatic doors with frosted glass

This stuff is illegal in some countries. Do NOT use your sleeve unless you plan to wash your sweater immediately after. Carry an emergency napkin/paper towel with you.

Apply shoulder to door

It’s a pull door
- Stand at the door until someone else comes in. Make sure you greet them and then slink out whistling a tune so they don't feel awkward.
- Got to hit it hard enough to make it bounce.../s
- Wiggly-wiggle with elbow.
- idk if y'all serious
  folks, take your hand under your shirt, put a foot in front of the door, pull the handle using your shirt
  if anyone pushes enthusastically trying to get in, your foot just saved your face