Time to throw in the towel.

So I'm sitting at my desk at this new job when all of a sudden my stomach calls up my brain and is all like "it's dog time."

So hey, I figured I'd check out the new hotness.

So I make the turn on 3rd Ave, cut down 52nd St. and walk right in through the main, but on my way to dilemmaville I start hankering for a place where one can, say, go to the bathroom, for instance.

So on my way out of the water closet, I discover a serious lack of paper towels. At first, I did not even notice the Xlerator.

The damn thing was too beautiful to be a hand dryer. I figured, hey, this place is Swedish or Scottish or Something; I accept and maybe even expect "fancy stuff" on the "walls." The Xlerator was really too damn beautiful to be a machine at all; it was like some gorgeous metal swan that someone head beheaded and befooted and taped to the wall. It was Xlerator's raw beauty alone, not the abstract desire for functionality, that compelled me to reach out and touch it. With quivering digits, I lifted my hands toward its fine, drooping spout.

And then it nearly blew my fucking fingers off.

The sound of 400 lawnmowers filled the little bathroom as the Xlerator's engine combusted, projecting 90-mile-an-hour winds* at my poor, unsuspecting hands. I was so goddamn scared that I would never have hands again. I had not even shaken the excess water off my hands (since I wasn't 100% sure what the Xlerator was, [though certainly more sure than this blog entry would suggest]), and yet my fingers were bone dry in five seconds. The Xlerator persisted for another ten seconds. Three of my fingers snapped off like twigs and hit the floor. Okay, I thought they would hit the floor. And finally the Xlerator relented.

I'd like to take a moment here to point out that the Xlerator's website copy seems to have been written by someone bursting with excitement at his/her/its new invention. It's like the guy really wanted to create a killer robot or some similar world-domination tool and then made a hand dryer entirely by accident. Proof? The hokey action movie tagline at the bottom of the site: Time to throw in the towel. When is it time, exactly? This summer? That season when your hands get wet?

Anyway.

I hurried out of the water closet and got my two delicious hot dogs and an ice-cold raspberry lemonade and I got the fuck out of there and I don't know if I can ever go back to that F&B 'cause I'm scared of the stupid hand dryer now and I'll probably just keep going back to the cool tiny F&B in Chelsea instead 'cause there's no bathroom there the end.



*actually 20,000 LFM or linear feet per minute. Roar!!