We’ve all experienced the dubious pleasure of drying our hands with an air dryer.  As the little label will tell you (if it isn’t covered by a crude drawing of male genitalia), hand dryers increase hygiene and decrease waste, all at once.  Magic!  Unfortunately the design process skipped over the moderately important step of actually “drying” the “hands”.  Instead, the hand dryer emits a pathetic burst of cold air that serves only to push the water on your hands up your sleeves, spreading the chill onto your forearms.  Magic!
Recently, some enterprising soul realized that there was money to be made in creating a hand dryer that actually did what it was meant to do.  And hence the Xlerator was born.

The first time I was in a bathroom where one of these puppies was installed, I was fairly sure that a jet had made an emergency landing in the next stall over.  After washing my hands, I approached the gleaming silver device with some trepidation.  It looked like it was going to solve the wetness of my hands by removing them permanently from my body.  But I’m not one to shy away from a potentially dangerous appliance, and so I intrepidly thrust both hands beneath the vent.
You know that thing that happens in movies where someone will be in a fast moving vehicle and the skin on their face starts to ripple comically?  That’s exactly what the skin on my hands did when the Xlerator kicked into gear.  I’m not exaggerating, this thing was actually pushing human flesh out of its way in an unstoppable quest to obliterate every single droplet of water left on my skin.  And by God, did it ever work.  I left the bathroom looking like I’d just emerged from one of those huge centrifuges they use to train astronauts to withstand G-force, but my hands were as dry as they’d ever been.
I can’t think of five categories to rank the Xlerator in, but for the achievement of being the first hand dryer that ever properly dried my hands (as well as for looking like a jet pack and having a badass name), I am proud to award the Xlerator Hand Dryer the Official Bathroom Blog Award of Technical Merit.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 18th, 2008 at 11:43 pm.