Powdered Soap Pyramids

In the elementary school where I spent the majority of my pre-teen life we had these old school bathrooms. They had great big long water trough style urinals and manual paper towel dispensers that required you to go backwards a little bit before you could turn them again (which doesn't stop kids from using tons of it, they just get good at shaking themselves all over the place while they dispense a paper towel all the way to the floor as quickly as they can). The coolest part of the bathroom though was the soap dispenser, behold:

So basically, here's what you got; There's a main storage unit with this little stick doohickey hanging out of the bottom. If you stick your little hand under there, palm up, and ram the doohickey up toward the main storage unit about half-way up before it stops it'll drop a small deposit of white pixie dust into your hand. Hooray! But wait, there's more. As you're releasing the doohickey back to its original position a second gift of powdery goodness is delivered to your outstretched hand. Oh joy! At this point you have a decision, you can either:

a). wet your hands and proceed to wash with the accumulated amount of pixie dust or

b). pump the magic doohickey another time or two (or 80) just to make sure it doesn't start coming out purple or something... cause that would be cool.

Either way, eventually you get to use the inevitably still white powder to get your hands super clean. Your hands aren't super clean because the powder is made of penicillin or anything, they're clean because the powder/sand scoured off the top three layers of your skin. The new pink skin underneath is the cleanest.

The really cool thing about this soap and its aforementioned dispenser however has to do with a fairly well known glitch in its dispensing mechanism (I've decided that if you took advantage of this glitch as a child you can feel free to consider yourself an "analog hacker"). The glitch goes like this, if you use only one finger to press the doohickey, instead of the intended open hand palm up, the powder packet will not find a welcome home in your filthy palm but instead will continue downward until stopped by some other object (usually the floor, sometimes a sink). Furthermore, failure to bring the doohickey into it fully upright and locked position instead stopping mid packet release causes the dispenser to actually continue dispensing powdery goodness forever (or until it runs out of soap, whichever comes first). The product of this constant stream of powder is a small but growing Powdered Soap Pyramid. Ants will marvel at its beauty and ponder its origins, and the janitor will consider it further justification for his hatred of children.