Hotel Showers
Something must be done.
On a recent morning I awoke in a hotel room in central Florida. So far, so good: As luck would have it, I had gone to bed the night before in exactly the same hotel room.
So the day was going well.
Then I decided to take a shower.
I went into the bathroom, opened the glass shower door, and found myself — a sleepy, naked, vulnerable man who does not have an engineering degree and who maybe had a couple of vodkas the evening before — face-to-face with this:
Remember: This is a shower we’re talking about. It’s a pipe that water comes out of. Why does it take three controls to make it do that? Actually, it’s four controls, because if you look closely you’ll see that the middle control has a sneaky little control behind the big control.
I have seen realistic movies set in nuclear submarines. When the submarine captain gives the command to dive — which is, quote, “Dive!” — the crewman turns a wheel, and the submarine goes down. One wheel, that’s all the crewman has to turn, so he knows immediately what to do. Imagine what would happen if our nuclear submarines were designed by the people who design our hotel shower controls.
RADAR OPERATOR: Captain, there’s a missile heading straight at us!
CAPTAIN: Dive!
CREWMAN (frowning at controls): Dive is the control on top, right?
CAPTAIN (having a look): Wouldn’t it make more sense if it was the one on the bottom? Because we want to go down?
CREWMAN: I suppose so, but… What about this middle control?
CAPTAIN: Maybe, but… Which middle control? The big one or the little one behind it?
MISSILE: BOOM
That’s right: Hotel shower controls are so complex that they could represent a serious threat to America’s national security, and yet untrained civilians who — we repeat — maybe had a couple of vodkas the night before are expected to somehow know how to operate them.
For the record, I did eventually get the central Florida hotel shower to work, but only after roughly 43 million gallons of lethally hot or hideously cold water sloshed down the drain while I was learning, by a process of trial and error, but mostly error, how to adjust the temperature. So if scientists notice that the global climate recently started changing even more than it already was, that’s on me.
Anyway, the good news is that I finally did figure out how to operate that particular hotel shower. Unfortunately, I’ll probably never be in that hotel again, and whatever future hotel showers I encounter will be completely different, thanks to the strict Hotel Shower Manufacturers Official Code of Ethics, which states: “No two hotel showers, even in the same hotel, shall have the same controls.” They’re working on a new wrinkle where the shower controls in your room will actually control the shower in another guest’s room, and vice versa.
Yes, it’s an exciting time for the hotel-shower industry. But it’s increasingly stressful for us guests. Do you think it’s too early for vodka?
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Oh wow, not to brag or anything, but we recently rented a Florida beach cottage that was built in 1959 and there was only ONE hot water knob and ONE cold water knob which your turned to the right or left to make the water come out of the shower head. You could even let the hot and cold mix together to just right temps and THEN turn on the shower without getting boiled or frozen.
This is clearly what we in the industry call a "five-star" hotel shower, whose guests like their showers as complicated as their mutual funds. "Hah", they say, "operating this shower is just as fun as the time we shorted that stock that left hundreds in poverty but made us millions."
Of course the plumbers, who lost their pants during that short, know this, so they install the hot water controls on a variable time delay. This means when you turn the shower to a good temperature and you are comfortable, a gush of hot water will suddenly scald you and you will, with soap in your eyes, grab one of the five or six shower controls and turn it wildly to the left, which will do absolutely nothing. You will still be scalded and keep adjusting the knob. Around four minutes later, when you have conditioner in, the knob twist will take effect and leave you freezing. This is intentional.
Next time, you need to go to a "cockroach" level hotel, where the shower is not as clean, but only has one control: off and on. And the water is a comfortable 30 degrees fahrenheit or 200 degrees fahrenheit - but unlike the five star hotel, YOU HAVE NO WAY TO ADJUST IT! It happens in its own. This alone saves a lot of frustration, which you will remember as you hear the squish of cockroaches under your feet as you step outside the shower in the dimly lit room. Maybe the submarine shower was better.