by Jason Wyvern
1 Minute
So I’m in the men’s toilets with my hands under the hand dryer. And for the record, I’ve been in the men’s toilets with my hands under the hand dryer for seventy-five seconds. My hands aren’t wet because I haven’t been to the toilet and I haven’t washed them, I just came in to warm them under the dryer. You see, I really like the feeling: warm, enveloping, safe. It’s motion-activated heaven. It’s the first draught of paradise. It’s Eden in waft form. It’s bloody ace.
2 Minutes
As far as I’m aware, the longest amount of time anybody in the world has kept their hands under a hand dryer—one that is continuously blowing hot air—is six minutes. And that was me, a month ago. It was freezing outside and I got to work, chucked my stuff on a table in the canteen, and headed straight to the toilet to thaw my paws. I could have gone longer than six minutes, but I kept thinking about my unguarded rucksack in the canteen. Anybody could have messed with it. Taken out my packed lunch and played football with the oranges, or run around with a sandwich on their head. Or, and this is a speciality of the people I work with, filled my rucksack with screwed up paper or dirty spoons from the kitchen. Yeah, it happens.
Well, today I’m going to beat that six-minute record. I’m going annihilate it. But I’m going to do more than that: I’m going to smash ten minutes. I’m going to hit double digits. And my rucksack? Safe and sound in my locker, thank you very much.
3 Minutes
It’s an Airforce hand dryer. Like the President’s plane, but without the One. I could get the exact same model, albeit second hand, off eBay for forty-five pounds. A new one would set me back three hundred and thirty-three pounds, or thereabouts. Then there’s the electricity needed to power it. Despite the boast on the casing about it being ‘low energy’, these bad boys suck up the juice. I know, because when I was a kid I had a fan heater in my bedroom, and I’d go to sleep with it whirring in my face. Wrrrrr! Until one night I lurched awake and my mom and dad were standing by the end of the bed, looking at me, looking at the fan, looking at me, and finally understanding why our electricity bills were so big. So it was sayonara fan, and nights with just my own hot breath under the covers to comfort me.
4 Minutes
We crash into the fourth minute and I’m studying the Airforce again. It’s white, with a burnished chrome finish. It looks like a Stormtrooper’s helmet, as if somebody has decapitated a soldier of the Empire and nailed his (I’m saying his, but I’m sure there are lady Stormtroopers) head to the wall as a warning. Not that I could imagine the Rebels doing such a thing. A bit too certificate 18. A bit too Anti-Disney. Talking of Disney, wasn’t Walt’s head cryogenically frozen? For all I know it’s in a white burnished container much like the Airforce (but without the ability to dry damp hands).
5 Minutes
What a sublime feeling this is! Like putting my hands back in the womb. Although now I come to think of it, that would be incredibly painful for my mom. Awkward too, for both of us. This insidious warmth, though. It’s alarmingly addictive. And you can only really do it at work. Stand in a public toilet with your hands under the dryer and you risk attacks from random loonies. ZOINK! Your trousers are whipped down. SCRACK! Your neck’s snapped. THWAP! Your head’s smashed into the hand dryer sending blood and tooth and tongue everywhere.
I’m not saying we don’t have random loonies at work—we do, at least seven—but they tend to stick to low-level cretinism, like stuffing paper or dirty spoons in unguarded rucksacks in the canteen.
6 Minutes
Six minutes in and I’m looking at the Airforce casing again (well, it’s either that or a stainless steel mixer tap). It says World Dryer on the front. Imagine an actual World Dryer, hovering over the South Pole like a spaceship in a Roland Emmerich movie? Say goodbye, Antarctica, you’ve just been melted in a lovely balmy gust, causing floods and tsunamis and parts of Kent to drown. Or maybe not; it’s motion sensitive so unless the Earth has a couple of extendable tectonic hands to keep jogging the sensor, nothing’s coming out of that nozzle.
7 Minutes
Old record, anyone? Six minutes: just been destroyed. Blown away like … well, a butterfly trying to fly under the Airforce. Which I hope never happens. The dryer would damage wings of said butterfly, and it would careen distressingly around the toilets before crash-landing into a sink or, worse, the urinal. Where it would die, with only stained deodorizer blocks for company. Nothing deserves that.
8 Minutes
I try to keep my mind in the here and now, to stay focussed, but it’s wandering, thinking of bigger and better things. As much as I like this shiny white nubbin on the wall, your real hard-core dryer aficionado needs an adjustable nozzle. Yeah, you could dry your hands, or you could rotate that bad boy one hundred and eighty degrees and point it at your face. Now that, my friend, is cloud ten. Sure, I can always crouch and angle my face up at the underside of Airforce, but I’d lose something. Namely dignity, shortly followed by the feeling in my calves.
9 Minutes
I’m making this sound like a breeze (ha ha! Hand dryer humour!), but there’s real skill involved in what I’m doing. For a start, there’s a lot of standing. This is my ninth minute on my feet. You heard correct: ninth minute. Knees. Thighs. Ankles. Back. Neck. They’re all tested in that time. They’re all asked tough questions.
Then I have to jink my hand every forty or so seconds, to make sure the hot air flow is continuous. You have to anticipate when Airforce is going to shut down and move your hand slightly to keep the blowing going, otherwise it shuts off and you’re just left holding your hands out like an overgrown Oliver impersonator. “Please, sir, can I have some more warm air?”
Then there’s your brain. How do you keep that occupied? How do you keep from…I won’t say losing your mind, let’s keep things in perspective. But you let your brain stray too far from the path and you’ve got a brain asking why exactly you’re standing in a toilet drying hands that were never wet. And nobody wants their own brain sassing them.
Oh, and let’s not get started on the health risks. Certain studies—I’m looking at you, University of Connecticut—tested thirty-six public bathrooms and found that hot air blowers were literally blowing shit around. Little faecal spores were gusting back and forth, making the air around them a whirling, swirling Petri dish of pathogens, spores and other words you used to hear on 24. But I’m willing to risk my health, mental and physical, to break this record. Speaking of which…
10 Minutes
I’ve just gone over ten minutes. I’ve just gone over ten mother-fudging minutes! I’ve just done something that some people—cynics, naysayers, anti-dreamers—thought would never be done in their life time. I’ve Roger Bannistered. I’ve Babe Ruthed. I’ve Neil Armstronged. I could leave now, walk out that toilet door with my head held high, but why not carry on? Why not ride this wave to the end? Plus, the longer I’m in here the less time I’m working. Have I mentioned how mind-numbingly tedious my job is?
11 Minutes
I’m warming (ha ha! More crazy hand dryer humour!) to the idea of thirteen minutes. It’s got a nice feel. That’s about how long it takes to run 5000 metres—and I like to think a lot of five thousand metre runners would really admire what I’m doing here. Mo Farah. Salvatore Antibo. Zola Budd. They’d all want to shake my very warm hand.
As the seconds tick by I try to work out how many circuits of the toilet it would take to travel 5000 metres. A lot, but it’d be nice having Mo Farah in here to talk to. We could support each other in our respective challenges, and also discuss Mo’s love of Quorn.
12 Minutes
I’ve been lucky, nobody’s been in. Just low-level grunts, minimum wage monkeys who can’t do anything but look at me funny, furious that my rucksack’s in my locker, safe from their stuffing hands. But that just changed. It’s the twelfth minute of this world record attempt and a manager has entered the arena.
He’s clocked me, standing by the dryer, then gone to do his business. Not that I want to think about it, but I need that business to last at least sixty seconds if I want to crack thirteen minutes and set a record that I can carve in the rock-face of time.
A toilet flushes. Already! What is he, The Flash? A tap starts running on the other side of the partition. I can’t move, yet. A quick look at my watch: thirty more seconds. Thirty more seconds? It suddenly seems an eternity. The tap still runs as the manager sluices squirty soap juice off his hands. Ten seconds, and a rival hand dryer starts up. Shit, shit and more flying microscopic shit! I’ve got to move or else answer some really awkward questions about why I’m standing drying two hands that are clearly already dry.
Five Seconds. Four. Three. Two. One… Gotcha!
13 Minutes
I swagger out of the toilets. I wonder if people can tell what I’ve done. Surely they can see I’m walking taller? That I have the bearing of a champion? The gait of a winner? And when I get home today I’ll know I’ve achieved something. Something tangible, something epic. Then I’ll pop a bit of moisturiser on my hands. They seem very dry.
Jason Wyvern currently lives in Shropshire. Since graduating with a degree in Government from Essex University, he has worked in a wide variety of jobs, including eBay seller, mail opener, call centre operative, and security guard. His work has appeared on the BBC, at the Manchester 24:7 Theatre Festival, and on the back lawn of a National Trust property. Most recently his stories have been featured in Ruminate, Ripples in Space, and The Martian Chronicle.