As I get close to the end of the larger, synthesizing topics I can discuss about our vacation, there remain lots of bits and pieces from my trip notes – odd sights, snatches of memorable conversation. I’ve collected them here.
* * * * *
In my report on Giles Ramsay’s theater talks, I mentioned the flat, unremarkable dialogue of Harold Pinter’s earlier plays. We actually heard that sort of conversation occasionally, most memorably at another table in the King’s Court restaurant aboard the Queen Mary 2. I was having breakfast and overheard two elderly British ladies talking as they looked out at the ocean. At first I thought they might be trying to be witty, but they were so deadpan about it, I decided not:
-- The scenery’s not very good, is it?
-- No, it’s a bit flat.
-- If you’re walking around the deck three times.
It was all rather Monty Python-ish. Appropriately, the sound system was playing a languid, sleepy female vocalist’s cover of “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.”
* * * * *
While we were tooling around London by bus, we passed through the Sloane Square/Sloan Street neighborhood, apparently very trendy and posh. Our trip manager told us the wealthy young girls who lived and shopped here were known as “Sloane Rangers … they get jobs in the city to feel useful but take four-day weekends in the country.”
* * * * *
As we took a turn around the private club known as Home House, I noticed a framed cartoon on the wall of a woman reading from a magazine, “Middle age is when a narrow waist and a broad mind change places,” and then shouting, “Who brought this utter drivel into the house?”
* * * * *
A pancake house called “My Old Dutch” took its name from the extensive catalog of cockney-stock exchange slang, in which a word or phrase that sounds like what you mean to say gets substituted, and then evolves or reduces to something else entirely. In this case, “My Old Dutch” refers to the wife at home; but it got there from “Duchess of Fife” substituted for “wife,” which then reduced to “Dutch.”
Similarly, you might hear a smart young man say “Let’s have a butcher’s” before stopping into a shop, or glancing at his watch. It means “let’s have a look,” but it evolved from “look” => “butcher’s hook” => “butcher’s.”
Make sense?
* * * * *
Someone on our tour asked tour guide Mel Montgomery to explain the hierarchy of British aristocratic titles. He said the Royal Family is at the top, of course. Below that come five levels of hereditary titles: Duke-Duchess (addressed as “His Grace” and “Her Grace”), Marquis/Marquess-Marchioness (originating from a military officer who led marches from one country into another), Earl/Count-Countess (“today, they’re all foreigners”), Viscount-Viscountess, and Baron-Baroness. Everyone below the Duke level may be addressed as “Lord” or “Lady.”
After that come other titles that are not hereditary, such as Baronet.
* * * * *
The television in our stateroom aboard the Queen Mary 2 was always on whenever we returned to it, even though we never turned it on or watched it. (Several channels featured recent movies on closed circuit -- no ads, I presume -- throughout the day and night.) Presumably it was turned on by our housekeeper and set to the ship’s informational channel; most of the time, it merely featured an onscreen reminder to set our clocks back another hour for the next day.
On our final night at sea, Carole noticed it was playing a short video about debarkation procedures. A serious, very dry officer of the bridge was explaining that we were to put all our packed luggage outside the door before midnight, whereupon the staff would “very carefully” carry it up to the seventh deck, and it would “very carefully” be lifted on pads by crane, and “very carefully” lowered to the docks, whereupon “longshoremen will proceed to throw it 300 yards down the pier.”
* * * * *
Having noticed that several of the British passengers sank American country music tunes during the pub karaoke sessions, I wondered why that would be so popular in the U.K. Somebody told me he had been in a record store in Norway that was almost exclusively filled with country western records; the owner was a rabid Hank Snow collector. But the female companion of one of the fabulous Cunard singers -- a young woman named Hannah who had moved with her lover to Nashville two years before and was currently recording her first album -- assured me that such was NOT the case. Country music has only a 2 percent market share in the U.K., she said, while its market share in the U.S. is 70 percent! I was left to ponder how ghettoized our own country is (“Friedrich Niche-ied,” as someone remarked once I was back home; maybe it was me), since I am so seldom exposed to it myself.
* * * * *
One of our charming Elderhostel tour mates was a woman who said her second marriage, from which she had been widowed, had worked very well because “I didn’t need a meal ticket and he didn’t need a housekeeper. I had been on my own for eight years; I didn’t need him.” At one point during a spirited disagreement early in their marriage, he said to her, “What we have here is two chiefs and no Indians.” From then on, when he had to take up a serious issue with her, he’d say, “C’mere, Chief; we need to have a pow-wow.”
* * * * *
One of the London chains for finer lines of men’s clothing is Pink’s, founded by Thomas Pink. When we were preparing to fly out of Heathrow, I noticed a display in a Pink’s of “commuter ties”: regular neckties that have a tiny pocket on the back side capable of holding an iPod so you can listen to it on the commuter train/Tube, etc.
* * * * *
A famous old name in British retailing is of course Harrod’s. What Carole noticed in the Harrod’s outlet at Heathrow, at least, was the humorous and sad fact that nearly every item in the place -- miniature British flags, teddy bears, teacups and other dinnerware with English motifs from royalty to the Beatles -- was made in China.
* * * * *
One snapshot of the times we live in . . . in Portland International Airport, regular announcements over the PA warn that unattended luggage is “subject to possession and search by airport police.” At Chicago’s O’Hare, it “will be picked up by the Chicago Police.” In Heathrow, however, it will simply “be destroyed” (!)
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
Monday, October 12, 2009
David: British newspapers
At first glance, you might think newspapers in Britain are in much better shape than they are stateside.
News stands carry the Telegraph, the Daily Mail, the Guardian, and an array of other newsprint dailies. Strangers thrust free copies of other publications -- City A.M., The London Paper, and others -- in your hands as you walk down the busy London streets.
Wow, you think: there’s much more selection here; a greater array of news sources and reading selections than in the rapidly diminishing one-paper towns and media mega-conglomerates back home.
But first looks can be deceiving. I asked our trip director Mel Montgomery, a native Brit and former official with the national tourism office where he was an assistant to Princess Diana’s stepmother, how many daily newspapers London has, and he said only one. The others are national papers. (Keep in mind that England has more than 13 times as many people as Oregon -- an estimated 51.5 million to our 3.8 -- living in a space that’s only a little more than half the size.)
If I’d had the time, money, and wherewithal to make a concerted comparison, it might have been interesting to examine which stories got the biggest play in Britain versus back home. The biggest news story that featured in both the serious dailies and the cheeky free papers concerned a scandal in which the British Attorney General, Baroness Scotland (the first woman ever to become the country’s top law official) had been discovered to employ an illegal immigrant as a housekeeper. The girl in question, Loloahi Tapui, 27, had come to the UK on a student visa in 2003, married, and been working for Lady Scotland six months. Part of the reason it got big play is that the Baroness had pressed so hard to get the law against such practices passed in the first place.
The second, less sexy news story that predominated in the serious dailies -- sometimes on the front page, sometimes tucked in on page 2 -- concerned the Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, and whether and how readily he would use “the c word” (cuts in the national budget).
The alternative weeklies gave more play to a screaming fight between Rolling Stones bass player Ronnie Wood, 62, and his 20-year-old girlfriend Ekaterina Ivanova in the wee hours of Monday morning, Sept. 14. Neighbors heard screamed obscenities, and a threat by Ivanova to commit suicide. Later in the week, large “removal men” were photographed carrying Wood’s guitars out of their north London flat.
The papers speculated that not only was Wood tired of the year-long romance with a pouty teen, but missed his ex- (second) wife Jo and children. I may have seen a gossip column item in which her friends stated she was doing just fine without him. I would imagine far fewer column inches and photos (if any) were devoted to this one in stateside papers.
It turned out our five days in London were the final week for a lively free daily called The London Paper -- its masthead read “thelondonpaper” with “paper” in trademark purple ink. Since it was making a big deal about its impending departure (regular readers and British celebs from pop singer Pixie Lott to Nicholas Hytner, artistic director of the National Theatre, offered quotes about how much they were going to miss it), I was able to learn a lot in just a couple of issues.
It was in tabloid format, like most of the older, more legitimate papers in England (and most of the alternative weeklies in the U.S.). What I liked was that the spine was stapled so it didn’t fall apart if I loosed my grip on it, the way the Willamette Week and the Portland Mercury back in Portland do. It had been launched by its young publisher and staff with backing money from … wait for it … Rupert Murdoch, and the tanking economy had killed its hopes, despite its apparently having made a big splash.
There was lots of color, both color photography and solid ink in the large ads. The content read more upbeat, less snarky in general, than the alternative weekly tabloids I’m used to seeing -- except in the fashion and pop star columns -- although the writers appeared to pitch their prose to twenty-somethings who were used to a lot of drinking and casual sex after their day at the stock exchange (or wish such were the case, I suppose). There were advice columns by gay and lesbian writers.
Among its most beloved items was a pet photo feature -- not just cute cats and dogs, sometimes doing a neat trick or dressed up in silly outfits, but snakes, pigs, hedgehogs, mice … everybody got into the act. Each photo included a brief list of the animal’s favorite TV shows, pet peeves, and worst bad habit.
News stands carry the Telegraph, the Daily Mail, the Guardian, and an array of other newsprint dailies. Strangers thrust free copies of other publications -- City A.M., The London Paper, and others -- in your hands as you walk down the busy London streets.
Wow, you think: there’s much more selection here; a greater array of news sources and reading selections than in the rapidly diminishing one-paper towns and media mega-conglomerates back home.
But first looks can be deceiving. I asked our trip director Mel Montgomery, a native Brit and former official with the national tourism office where he was an assistant to Princess Diana’s stepmother, how many daily newspapers London has, and he said only one. The others are national papers. (Keep in mind that England has more than 13 times as many people as Oregon -- an estimated 51.5 million to our 3.8 -- living in a space that’s only a little more than half the size.)
If I’d had the time, money, and wherewithal to make a concerted comparison, it might have been interesting to examine which stories got the biggest play in Britain versus back home. The biggest news story that featured in both the serious dailies and the cheeky free papers concerned a scandal in which the British Attorney General, Baroness Scotland (the first woman ever to become the country’s top law official) had been discovered to employ an illegal immigrant as a housekeeper. The girl in question, Loloahi Tapui, 27, had come to the UK on a student visa in 2003, married, and been working for Lady Scotland six months. Part of the reason it got big play is that the Baroness had pressed so hard to get the law against such practices passed in the first place.
The second, less sexy news story that predominated in the serious dailies -- sometimes on the front page, sometimes tucked in on page 2 -- concerned the Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, and whether and how readily he would use “the c word” (cuts in the national budget).
The alternative weeklies gave more play to a screaming fight between Rolling Stones bass player Ronnie Wood, 62, and his 20-year-old girlfriend Ekaterina Ivanova in the wee hours of Monday morning, Sept. 14. Neighbors heard screamed obscenities, and a threat by Ivanova to commit suicide. Later in the week, large “removal men” were photographed carrying Wood’s guitars out of their north London flat.
The papers speculated that not only was Wood tired of the year-long romance with a pouty teen, but missed his ex- (second) wife Jo and children. I may have seen a gossip column item in which her friends stated she was doing just fine without him. I would imagine far fewer column inches and photos (if any) were devoted to this one in stateside papers.
It turned out our five days in London were the final week for a lively free daily called The London Paper -- its masthead read “thelondonpaper” with “paper” in trademark purple ink. Since it was making a big deal about its impending departure (regular readers and British celebs from pop singer Pixie Lott to Nicholas Hytner, artistic director of the National Theatre, offered quotes about how much they were going to miss it), I was able to learn a lot in just a couple of issues.
It was in tabloid format, like most of the older, more legitimate papers in England (and most of the alternative weeklies in the U.S.). What I liked was that the spine was stapled so it didn’t fall apart if I loosed my grip on it, the way the Willamette Week and the Portland Mercury back in Portland do. It had been launched by its young publisher and staff with backing money from … wait for it … Rupert Murdoch, and the tanking economy had killed its hopes, despite its apparently having made a big splash.
There was lots of color, both color photography and solid ink in the large ads. The content read more upbeat, less snarky in general, than the alternative weekly tabloids I’m used to seeing -- except in the fashion and pop star columns -- although the writers appeared to pitch their prose to twenty-somethings who were used to a lot of drinking and casual sex after their day at the stock exchange (or wish such were the case, I suppose). There were advice columns by gay and lesbian writers.
Among its most beloved items was a pet photo feature -- not just cute cats and dogs, sometimes doing a neat trick or dressed up in silly outfits, but snakes, pigs, hedgehogs, mice … everybody got into the act. Each photo included a brief list of the animal’s favorite TV shows, pet peeves, and worst bad habit.
Thursday, October 8, 2009
David: A Few Words about Comfort Facilities and Hygiene
I wash my hands a lot more than I used to.
I haven’t turned into Howard Hughes just yet, but it’s been impossible to ignore the occasional news stories about various unnerving studies.
For example, unless regularly cleaned and disinfected (and they rarely are), office desktops and computer keyboards are often filthier than nearby bathrooms.
Grocery shopping carts carry more germs -- from contaminated meats and infant riders as well as, one presumes, fellow shoppers who don’t wash their hands –--than the toilet seats in their stores … because the latter get cleaned and disinfected more often. Swabs taken from shopping cart handles turned up saliva, blood, fecal matter, mucus (and worse), plus Listeria, Salmonella, Staph, E. Coli, and general individual bacteria. The only public surfaces found to be more disease-ridden are playground equipment and bus rails.
And of course, going back to what Mom always told us: communicable diseases are most often contracted through one’s hands, so wash them often.
More and more, I not only wash my hands before meals and after using the toilet, but exit from public restrooms carrying paper towels to shield my fingers from the door handle; push open other doors with pressure on the door itself (as opposed to the marked handle; the best is a door that opens away with a kick-panel I can shove with my foot) or pull them open by whatever I guess is the least-handled portion of the door handle; and press elevator buttons with the back of my clothed wrist.
Better than all these options is when someone else is present to push the buttons, pull the handle, etc., and I can glide through behind them, with no more than a clothed shoulder or elbow to keep the door from closing on me. But I haven’t gotten to the point where I wait around for someone to show up, or turn on faucet taps with my foot, as an acquaintance told me a truly germ-phobic coworker does.
U.S. society in general has become more and more sensitive to the issue of germ transmission and its avoidance. Over the years we’ve seen the introduction of motion-activated flushing on urinals and sit-down toilets (but why do the latter make that weird squealing sound that, for an instant, make me think a live rodent has entered the stall?), motion-activated faucets, motion-activated hand blow-dryers and paper-towel dispensers.
The only other thing we have to touch with everybody else is the bathroom door, and the one solution I’ve seen to this is the space-devouring option that only airports can afford: an open passage of overlapping walls through which you wend your way.
All of this is prefatory to comments about preparing for my latest vacation last month, and what I observed on it.
Overseas travel offers an opportunity to see how well (or poorly) other countries handle comfort hygiene. Like languages, restrooms in other lands can vary astonishingly in how they address basic human functions.
But first, there’s the getting there and back. Every time we’ve flown anywhere in the past two decades, it seems that Carole has caught a cold. When hundreds of people file through an enclosed space in a day, the law of averages says a few of them are going to bring germs along.
Commercial airline toilets are incredibly germ-ridden. I was determined to have as little contact with them as possible. I packed breathing masks in my pockets but felt too inhibited to put one on until I noticed -- of course -- the older gentleman in the seat next to me coughing steadily. I actually timed him, surreptitiously, hacking once a minute or less, roughly.
This is one time I’m hoping that’s a smoker’s cough, I murmured to Carole, and quietly put on a mask. Oddly enough, the man stopped coughing as soon as the plane was airborne (an anxiety cough?), so after a while I took off the mask.
Through careful planning -- timing of a bathroom break before boarding and a sparing amount of drinking on the plane -- I managed to avoid the airline toilet altogether on the five-and-a-half-hour flight from Portland to New York. I knew that probably wasn’t going to be practical on the roughly nine-hour London-to-Chicago leg home. As it turned out, I visited that toilet for “number one” only once and didn’t have to touch anything: a couple of facial tissues in my hand protected me (I hope) from the door and toilet flusher.
Our trip to England took us to a land that was not considerably less “civilized” in this area than the U.S., via a route (the Cunard flagship Queen Mary 2) that was even more sensitive to these issues than most.
We encountered nothing like the pair of foot-shaped pads above a small hole inside a blank stone room that constitutes a toilet in Muslim lands like Morocco (summer 1969, with my family); nor the home toilet in Tallinn, Estonia (summer 1994) that has a dry catchment, so you get a good strong whiff of your deposit before it gets washed away; nor again the long open pit at the equivalent of a fairgrounds in Estonia (I thought “I hope I don’t drop my wallet!”). Nor were there any bathroom foyers where an old lady in black sold individual toilet paper squares to the patrons as they enter, as in St. Petersburg, Russia. (Forewarned, we carried our own.)
On the other hand, none of the places we went had quite caught up to Finland (where, my bother Toby has shown us, showers have complicated faucet designs that allow you to set your ideal temperature, and then turn the water on and off at that preset level, to conserve without getting hit with overly hot or cold laving again) or Japan (where some toilets have a warming element in the seat and buttons for various other "services" for your backside, from a jet of warm, washing water to a blast of warm, drying air).
As I said, the ocean liner was considerably more sensitive to these issues than most tourist facilities. The welcoming line at the Britannia Restaurant for every meal actually included a staffer who held a large squeeze bottle of hand disinfectant, so diners could avail themselves of hand-washing gel before sitting at table. Many of the bathrooms had small cloth towels -- about the size of a wash cloth -- rolled into tubes and lined up in straw baskets for drying one’s hands (and a separate disposal for the used ones) as an alternative to paper towels.
I saw a lot more hot-air hand dryers on this trip than I think one encounters in the U.S. Some were motion activated, some had a button (though you can usually activate those with a poke of the elbow). The most impressive one was, I think, in Shakespeare’s Globe theater, because you put your hands inside a horizontal chamber where they were blasted with stiff warm air on both sides. It was faster and more effective than any other I’d seen. As I recall, it was motion-activated so you didn’t have to touch anything.
In Chicago’s O’Hare Airport, I encountered the first significant improvement on the old James River semi-opaque paper toilet seat covers: a seat with its own built-in, revolving or replaceable plastic seat protector. A plastic wrap encloses the entire toilet seat like a sleeve around a donut, with fresh plastic coming out of a compartment on the right rear side (as you’re looking down at it), and circling around the seat into the “used” compartment on the left rear side. Here’s what the instructions said:
“SaniSeat [with a registered trademark “R” in the circle next to it]
To use
1. Place hand in front of sensor
2. Wait for fresh cover to encircle seat
3. Seat now ready for use
After use sensor off for 20 seconds
Old plastic is destroyed and NEVER used again!”
The “never” was spelled out in italics. Pretty impressive, if it had worked. But it didn’t. After waving my hand in front of the sensor several times and getting nothing, I ended up pulling fresh plastic out of the right side and bunching up the used portion near the rear left side before sitting down.
I haven’t turned into Howard Hughes just yet, but it’s been impossible to ignore the occasional news stories about various unnerving studies.
For example, unless regularly cleaned and disinfected (and they rarely are), office desktops and computer keyboards are often filthier than nearby bathrooms.
Grocery shopping carts carry more germs -- from contaminated meats and infant riders as well as, one presumes, fellow shoppers who don’t wash their hands –--than the toilet seats in their stores … because the latter get cleaned and disinfected more often. Swabs taken from shopping cart handles turned up saliva, blood, fecal matter, mucus (and worse), plus Listeria, Salmonella, Staph, E. Coli, and general individual bacteria. The only public surfaces found to be more disease-ridden are playground equipment and bus rails.
And of course, going back to what Mom always told us: communicable diseases are most often contracted through one’s hands, so wash them often.
More and more, I not only wash my hands before meals and after using the toilet, but exit from public restrooms carrying paper towels to shield my fingers from the door handle; push open other doors with pressure on the door itself (as opposed to the marked handle; the best is a door that opens away with a kick-panel I can shove with my foot) or pull them open by whatever I guess is the least-handled portion of the door handle; and press elevator buttons with the back of my clothed wrist.
Better than all these options is when someone else is present to push the buttons, pull the handle, etc., and I can glide through behind them, with no more than a clothed shoulder or elbow to keep the door from closing on me. But I haven’t gotten to the point where I wait around for someone to show up, or turn on faucet taps with my foot, as an acquaintance told me a truly germ-phobic coworker does.
U.S. society in general has become more and more sensitive to the issue of germ transmission and its avoidance. Over the years we’ve seen the introduction of motion-activated flushing on urinals and sit-down toilets (but why do the latter make that weird squealing sound that, for an instant, make me think a live rodent has entered the stall?), motion-activated faucets, motion-activated hand blow-dryers and paper-towel dispensers.
The only other thing we have to touch with everybody else is the bathroom door, and the one solution I’ve seen to this is the space-devouring option that only airports can afford: an open passage of overlapping walls through which you wend your way.
All of this is prefatory to comments about preparing for my latest vacation last month, and what I observed on it.
Overseas travel offers an opportunity to see how well (or poorly) other countries handle comfort hygiene. Like languages, restrooms in other lands can vary astonishingly in how they address basic human functions.
But first, there’s the getting there and back. Every time we’ve flown anywhere in the past two decades, it seems that Carole has caught a cold. When hundreds of people file through an enclosed space in a day, the law of averages says a few of them are going to bring germs along.
Commercial airline toilets are incredibly germ-ridden. I was determined to have as little contact with them as possible. I packed breathing masks in my pockets but felt too inhibited to put one on until I noticed -- of course -- the older gentleman in the seat next to me coughing steadily. I actually timed him, surreptitiously, hacking once a minute or less, roughly.
This is one time I’m hoping that’s a smoker’s cough, I murmured to Carole, and quietly put on a mask. Oddly enough, the man stopped coughing as soon as the plane was airborne (an anxiety cough?), so after a while I took off the mask.
Through careful planning -- timing of a bathroom break before boarding and a sparing amount of drinking on the plane -- I managed to avoid the airline toilet altogether on the five-and-a-half-hour flight from Portland to New York. I knew that probably wasn’t going to be practical on the roughly nine-hour London-to-Chicago leg home. As it turned out, I visited that toilet for “number one” only once and didn’t have to touch anything: a couple of facial tissues in my hand protected me (I hope) from the door and toilet flusher.
Our trip to England took us to a land that was not considerably less “civilized” in this area than the U.S., via a route (the Cunard flagship Queen Mary 2) that was even more sensitive to these issues than most.
We encountered nothing like the pair of foot-shaped pads above a small hole inside a blank stone room that constitutes a toilet in Muslim lands like Morocco (summer 1969, with my family); nor the home toilet in Tallinn, Estonia (summer 1994) that has a dry catchment, so you get a good strong whiff of your deposit before it gets washed away; nor again the long open pit at the equivalent of a fairgrounds in Estonia (I thought “I hope I don’t drop my wallet!”). Nor were there any bathroom foyers where an old lady in black sold individual toilet paper squares to the patrons as they enter, as in St. Petersburg, Russia. (Forewarned, we carried our own.)
On the other hand, none of the places we went had quite caught up to Finland (where, my bother Toby has shown us, showers have complicated faucet designs that allow you to set your ideal temperature, and then turn the water on and off at that preset level, to conserve without getting hit with overly hot or cold laving again) or Japan (where some toilets have a warming element in the seat and buttons for various other "services" for your backside, from a jet of warm, washing water to a blast of warm, drying air).
As I said, the ocean liner was considerably more sensitive to these issues than most tourist facilities. The welcoming line at the Britannia Restaurant for every meal actually included a staffer who held a large squeeze bottle of hand disinfectant, so diners could avail themselves of hand-washing gel before sitting at table. Many of the bathrooms had small cloth towels -- about the size of a wash cloth -- rolled into tubes and lined up in straw baskets for drying one’s hands (and a separate disposal for the used ones) as an alternative to paper towels.
I saw a lot more hot-air hand dryers on this trip than I think one encounters in the U.S. Some were motion activated, some had a button (though you can usually activate those with a poke of the elbow). The most impressive one was, I think, in Shakespeare’s Globe theater, because you put your hands inside a horizontal chamber where they were blasted with stiff warm air on both sides. It was faster and more effective than any other I’d seen. As I recall, it was motion-activated so you didn’t have to touch anything.
In Chicago’s O’Hare Airport, I encountered the first significant improvement on the old James River semi-opaque paper toilet seat covers: a seat with its own built-in, revolving or replaceable plastic seat protector. A plastic wrap encloses the entire toilet seat like a sleeve around a donut, with fresh plastic coming out of a compartment on the right rear side (as you’re looking down at it), and circling around the seat into the “used” compartment on the left rear side. Here’s what the instructions said:
“SaniSeat [with a registered trademark “R” in the circle next to it]
To use
1. Place hand in front of sensor
2. Wait for fresh cover to encircle seat
3. Seat now ready for use
After use sensor off for 20 seconds
Old plastic is destroyed and NEVER used again!”
The “never” was spelled out in italics. Pretty impressive, if it had worked. But it didn’t. After waving my hand in front of the sensor several times and getting nothing, I ended up pulling fresh plastic out of the right side and bunching up the used portion near the rear left side before sitting down.
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