An Irishman's Diary

In the toilet of a posh Dublin pub at the weekend, I searched in vain for a towel or a hot-air dispenser to dry my hands. There may have been one hidden somewhere. But before I could find it, I was confronted with a paper towel-roll, operated by one of those new, light-sensitive and environmentally-friendly dispensers: a man.

With conventional towel technology, the risk always is that you will take more than necessary, thereby increasing paper waste or detergent use. The advantage of having a live male holding the roll is that most customers automatically reduce their towel usage. This is especially true if they sense that the dispenser is making eye contact, in breach of Article One of the Geneva Convention on Gents Toilet Etiquette. They won't be certain that he is, because they sure as hell won't be returning his gaze. But the instinct on such occasions is to take about half the amount of paper you need and get out quick.

Part of Ireland's bourgeoning service sector, the man in the toilet is not particularly new. I first met him (not the same one, you understand; although it could be - I still haven't seen his face) while at a dinner dance in an upmarket hotel seven or eight years ago, when the "tips" on his plate were mostly £1 coins. He was a harbinger of the economic boom then. Yet even after another decade of economic growth, his service still seems to be ahead of its time.

You have to have reached a very high position on the hierarchy of needs before you require a human towel dispenser in a public toilet. And as for the range of toiletries he also usually has to offer, I have yet to witness an exchange even broadly along the following lines. Toilet user: "Can I try the Chanel Pour Homme?" Towel dispenser: "Certainly sir. Just give me your wrist." No, most men take the towel with visible embarrassment, and then rummage in their pockets for change, knowing they will throw down the first coin they find, hoping it's not more than 50 cent.

It may be neither here nor there, and I mention it only because I suspect it's somewhere in between. But I noticed that the man in the pub toilet at the weekend was not Caucasian. He could have been born and reared in the Liberties, for all I know. Yet his complexion marked him as a recent arrival from a continent that was long plundered by white Europeans like me.

Visiting the gents' can be an uneasy enough experience at the best of times, what with residual evolutionary tensions between neighbouring urinal users, collective embarrassment over the splashes on the floor, and general guilt over the user/cleaner relationship. The addition of an obvious racial difference between the users and the only person working in the toilet multiplies the discomfort.

Merely to offer a man a towel in these circumstances is to raise issues that he can resolve in the short term only by giving you €1.

The man in the toilet highlights a truth about tipping generally. It's a popular myth, especially in the US, that tips are in some way a reward for service. The better the service, the bigger the tip, is the rule. In fact, an academic at Cornell University who spent years researching the phenomenon found that most people give the same amounts everywhere they go. Only 4 per cent of the average tip was influenced by quality of service, he concluded, with a similar percentage influenced by the weather.

A hotel I stayed in last year underlined this reality by adding a "discretionary service gratuity" of 12.5 per cent to my restaurant bill. When I inquired whose discretion they were exercising, I was told I could deduct the amount if service had been unsatisfactory. But this was suspiciously close to the French system whereby the menu prices include a 15 per cent service charge and, if you're not satisfied, you can deduct yourself from the premises.

Insofar as tips really are discretionary, most people give them to relieve their consciences, troubled as they are over their unequal relationship with the service provider and the perception, usually correct, that the latter could not survive on his or her wages alone.

The man in the toilet is the ultimate example, giving us a service we don't need and don't want, but for which we will pay him anyway. I presume we owe his arrival here to the Americans, those champions of free enterprise to whom we also owe most of our tipping habits. It's a paradox of the US way of life that a notoriously tax-hating nation has made gratuities all but compulsory in many areas. And it's an even bigger paradox that a people famed for plain speaking can invent euphemisms such as "restroom", even though, as we've seen, a public toilet is about the last place you'd think of relaxing.