Never have I heard a single student give thanks for the single most appealing feature of school bathrooms, if not the school itself. People worship the vending machines, enjoy the phone charging station, and speak fondly of the cafeteria burritos. Yet the hand dryers are unappreciated, and even, in extreme cases, hated.

I’ll admit that in a bathroom with both hand dryers and paper towels, I am, as a generally impatient person, likely to choose the paper towel for the sake of immediacy. But I’m only human, and prone to weakness, like us all. I know hand dryers are better in every way, but I need to be forced, or at least nudged, into making the right decision.

Back in middle school, I was, unfortunately, attending a certain facility which insisted on using paper towels instead of hand dryers. Each morning, not long after the first bell rang, the bathrooms were littered with soggy paper towels, clogging the sinks and cluttering the space around—never in—the trash can.

Each offhand complaint about damp hands pierces my heart. Students just fail to appreciate how lucky they are, gifted with hand dryers in a world full of paper-toweled bathrooms. Next time you think about rolling your eyes as you grumble some careless remark, remember the ingenuity of the hand dryers.

I can hardly imagine the amount of money, effort, and natural resources that are wasted on paper towels in a single school. Each time that I walk into a smelly B-Hall bathroom, I thank my lucky stars that our school had the wisdom to install hand dryers. I relish the warmth of those blessed hand dryers each day, knowing how much janitorial effort, how much money, and how many trees are saved. That’s what I call an investment, people.