[quote=“Medievalist, post:75, topic:77052, full:true”]I know this one!
A drunk plumber.[/quote]
Or a lazy one. In my ancient apartment, hot water and cold water come from opposite sides of the house (the hot water heater is installed where the gas line was most conveniently reached over by the stove). In the bathroom, this means hot water supply comes in from the right and cold water comes in from the left.
So when doing the bathroom sink only (not the shower!) The plumber just put in the sink with the cold on the left, and the hot on the right. And it’s all hard-plumbed (no hoses) so I can’t just fix it.
Still, it’s not a hotel, so I only had to learn it once…
This reminds me of the UK Vulcan bomber pilots, who on an atomic drop run were told to steer the aircraft with one eye closed after release, so they could see to get home even if the explosion was a bit brighter than expected. You get to keep your other arm if the shower is at the wrong temperature, which is nice and handy when dialling 911; but you are left with the nagging feeling that things could be done better.
I would like showers with standard settings like gas marks for ovens - perhaps one, two or three red dots or blue dots; and a light which is red/blue when the sensor in the shower head (or at the top end of the shower tube, as shower heads have to come off) is at the wrong temperature, and goes off at the right temperature. So, if I knew I was a two red dot man, I could turn any shower to that and step in when the light went off.
But, no. If they were designing what I want, we would never have the enigmatic single chrome control in the first place.
My wife recently ran into something like this in India. Opening the door to the room would turn the room lights on for 30 seconds, then they automatically shut off. She’d have to feel her way back to the door, exit and reenter. Rinse, repeat. She was into hour 26 of travel when she encountered this for the first time in her life and thought she was going mad. Eventually she realized there was a slot in which to place the key card which allowed everything in the room to work on demand.
Honestly, I like the two-knob mixer I’ve got at home. One is “amount of water”, easy enough. The other has a fixed dot pointing at a band that goes from blue to red on the part you turn, to set the target temperature. The thermostat in it [1] seems to work well, so after I found an acceptable temperature I’ve barely touched it. Showering is a case of turning the water on and waiting for it to warm up; no “did I find the right mix or will this turn scalding when the hot water truly heats up”. And, yes, this is the type everyone except hotels seems to have here. I assume all hotels buy their fixtures at weird hotel conferences in belarussia.
[1] A wax plug affair, I think; they supposedly react much faster to temperature spikes.
Thy air-conditioning unit shall be controlled by no more than two large and intuitive buttons (temperature and intensity), and verily these buttons shall be found either upon the AC unit itself, or upon an obvious wall-mounted control panel in proximity to the AC unit, and not be controlled, for example, by an unlabeled on-switch on the other side of the room and a remote control with five buttons bearing incoherent iconography which must be pressed in exactly the correct arcane sequence to produce the desired effect, lest ye die.
My townhouse has three rooms with a pair of switched outlets in each. Normally you get a pair of outlets where one (usually the upper one) is controlled by a switch, and the other (lower) one is always on. NOPE! That’s three nearly-useless outlets. One of these days I’m gonna hire an electrician to fix it. (I’d do it myself, but the co-op insists on a professional.)
Keep a roll of drafting tape in your bag. You may have to pile up a few layers but it can completely obscure it, and it’s pretty easy to peel off. Anything in my home with a too-bright LED gets this treatment.
You could probably substitute some other kind of tape. Maybe some kind of medical tape, some of that is pretty thick. That might even be more opaque. Probably not duct tape, though. That stuff’s a pain in the ass to peel off nicely.
AMore than once, I’ve had to made the judgement call, am I about to turn the shower on, or is the thing I think I’m supposed to pull going to break off in my hand?
That happened the night we moved to this place. After a full day of moving I was filthy and exhausted and looking forward to a nice shower. Handle broke off in my hand, water started pouring through the can lighting in the room below, and the ceiling around the light got that telltale bulge. Had to run down to the basement (didn’t know where the water shutoff was; nor which box a flashlight might be found) and then find something to poke one hole in the ceiling and put a bucket underneath to give the water somewhere to go.
At least if it had been a hotel shower, I wouldn’t have been responsible for fixing any of it, and would have gotten a different room with working water in short order!
My last few trips have been hiking across Spain for weeks at a time, with everything I had with me carried on my back. I was just glad to get a bunk bed that had no bed bugs and a shower in a communal bathroom that was warmer than lukewarm. It was awesome if there was wifi somewhere in the building and absolute luxury if there were sheets and towels. IMHO everything else is superfluous.
Gives a whole other dimension to the male/female plug idea.
