It
continues to amaze me that janitors and maintenance personnel universally seem
to not understand paper towel dispensers.
Mind you, these are relatively low-tech devices. One simply opens the cover, places the paper
towels into the holder and close the door.
The only real decision to be made and the one that is apparently the
most problematical is how much paper to place in the holder. Here, a basic understanding of the dispenser
is critical.
The
dispenser is designed to accommodate a certain type of paper towel. These towels are folded in a manner which
allows each towel to be removed from the dispenser while simultaneously
"loading" the next towel to facilitate on-going easy dispensing. To set off this self-loading procedure, the
first towel has to be manually fed through the slot, which is generally located
at the bottom of the holder. Once
loaded, the action is automatically repeated as a function of the folds in the
paper stack.
Assuming
the towels are placed into the holder correctly, that is to say, such that the
dispensing can happened, the only other requirement is that the holder not be
over loaded. Here is where the
janitorial world seems to misunderstand the process. If the holder is stuffed to its capacity the
natural unfolding process is inhibited. Instead
of pulling one towel out at a time the compression of the towels due to the
over filling causing the towels to tear and come out in pieces. In order to get a usable towel when the
dispenser is in this condition, one has to force out a hand full of paper
towels at once. This is generally a
waste both in time and paper, because in order to get one or two usable towels,
ten or fifteen must be yanked out. The
extra unneeded towels are discarded.
