The short version: to use the WC at Amersfoort Station, you call an 0900 number that charges you and opens the door. Confused? So was I.

Mobile phones are great technology. Text messaging is great technology. Text messaging on a mobile phone is terrible technology. I could rant for pages about how bad mobile phones are for basically everything except making phone-calls; email, cameraphones, WAP, and so on. But all of these are overshadowed by the toilets on the platform at Amersfoort Station.

Dutch public toilets usually cost something in the vicinity of 50 euro cents to use. Sometimes there is a WC attendant with a little collection tray, sometimes the process is automated with a coin-operated turnstile. (In Amsterdam Centraal, they have a turnstile and an attendant who will give you correct change if you need it.) Moving as we are towards a cashless society, the Dutch also have a variant of the PIN-operated card –EFT-POS for Kiwis– called ChipKnip, designed expressly for small transactions. You load money onto the card itself, rather than accessing your bank account for each transaction, and it doesn’t require a PIN entry to pay by Chipper. On the well-known principle that “Anyone can invent a better wheel,” the designer of the Amersfoort Station WC bypassed all these obvious options.

Instead, there’s a sign beside the door showing an 0900 number, and a series of instructions. You call this number, then enter a code identifying this particular WC. You pay 50 cents plus the cost of the call, and when you’ve entered the code the door opens. You’re warned that a sanitation cycle will begin 15 minutes later.

It terrifies me that this design actually got implemented. On one level, it’s scary for what it says about the attitudes involved (“Don’t have a mobile? You’re almost certainly homeless, and probably a junky. We don’t want you in our toilets.”). On another, there’s the sad lesson of stupidity inertia (as if the QWERTY keyboard wasn’t enough). This country already has a system for making micropayments, and it’s a system that works. And yet, people only take up ChipKnip when they’re forced to — and everyone has a mobile phone.

Except, this is becoming more and more a misnomer. I don’t really have a mobile phone, I have an extremely poorly designed text messaging device. Many people I know have even more poorly designed combination text messagers and cameras. And now, if Amersfoort is anything to go by, it’s a text-messager-cum-camera-cum-bankcard. A bankcard too thick to fit in your wallet, which requires you to negotiate the dialup connection for the transfer by hand. Still, we can’t deny the march of technology, right? Wouldn’t it be terrible if we still had to carry coins around in our pockets?