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Our office building recently upgraded (eye of the beholder I guess) to the Dyson Airblade. It's pretty novel the first couple of uses, although it doesn't exactly communicate its function as clearly as possible.

It operates using sensors and timers. The timer really needs one of those countdown displays you find at the automated car wash dryers. You know, as you're driving out of the carwash a big overhead/side dryer kicks in and a countdown begins letting you know how long you have? Well, it's the same idea here. In fact, the hand dryer works in pretty much the exact same way. You stick your hands in there and slowly pull them out, the airflow "squeegees" off the water from your hand as you pull them out.

The biggest gripe I have with it is in the sensors used to detect a hand is in there. I must have particularly small fingertips, because the Dyson Airblade will ALWAYS cut off just right as I get to the end of my hand (fingertips) causing me to walk out feeling like I just dipped my hand in a glass of water.

After talking with my coworkers, I've found that this is not an uncommon situation (thankfully, my fingertips are normal). In commiserating, we've all shared our workarounds for getting fully dry hands, all are a variant of the (thusly defined/coined) "Dyson Shuffle" and the "Dyson Flap."

• Dyson Shuffle: This action involves keeping one hand fully inserted into the Airblade while the other dries off, this allows one hand to dry while keeping the sensor active. Then, while dry, you move it back into the Airblade to dry the other hand. This looks a lot like a DJ working the ones and twos.
  
• Dyson Flap: Same idea, but this has both hands moving up, then you quickly move your hands in from the side before the sensor shuts off the device to repeat the process. This move looks sort of like Michael Phelps doing a butterfly stroke. Logic- two quick dries equals one full dry
  

Of course, all this is to illustrate the silliness of the whole matter. How about just repositioning your sensor to accurately detect the hand? or perhaps extend by an extra second or two the airflow before shutting off?

There's a couple things I thought were interesting about this faucet I found in the gym shower, but none more interesting than the fact that I took my camera phone into the gym shower.

Anyway, assuming you haven't called the cops yet, let's take a look at this:

First a good thing- you can't really tell here, but in order to turn it on, you have to move counter-clockwise starting at the 6 o'clock position. This takes your travel through the hot water zone first. I've always thought that makes the most sense and minimizes the amount of cold water time you're potentially exposed to. Ok- so it's a small "good", but still, a better experience than most. Edit! I just realized that, if you except the fact that this is in a gym and place this somewhere where a child might run across it, or maybe special needs type folks, maybe it would be a safety/scalding issue. So in retrospect, I'm going to take away that "one good thing" as small as it was.

There are two things I noticed that were strange about it... let's get a shot of the otherside for the complete picture here:

You can see if you examine closely, that the high-to-low (labeled as the black arrow that say "Hi-Tub-Lo" adjustment switch is along the bottom, but can move in either direction to increase the water pressure, it's a little obscure in the first picture as it's slightly covered. So- the 6 o'clock position is the lowest water pressure and you can move it right or left to increase the pressure. It seems like a strange mapping to have, but I suppose in retrospect that this might be two seperate controls for a tub *and* a shower (this was strickly a shower only- no tub though)since the "Tub" is written in there. The other side is blurry and I can't recall what it said... but even still, it doesn't quite seem right or natural.

The other is the fact that you have one control that manages the water pressure, and one control that manages the water temperature. So off hand, which do you think should actually turn the water on or off? As you can see at the top of the first picture, it's the temperature control that turns the flow of water on and off... not the control that controls... ummm the flow of water.

...and for those folks that think this might be the ebay naked teapot kinda post, (google it! no link) fuggetaboutit- you can clearly see my white shirt in the top picture.