At least this one has an off-on instruction

I was on one of those sampler platter trips where you spend not enough time at too many places and the whole thing passes in a blur. I was forever in a hurry and I only had a few minutes before I was supposed to be at dinner, and I couldn’t figure out how to use my bathroom. How could bathrooms be this confusing? I was in Ireland, not Swaziland.

You see strange things when you travel. And more often than not, you can find plenty of them just in the hotel bathroom. The Shavers Only outlets that look like lightning bolts and like nothing you’ve ever seen hanging off the end of any electrical cord in the known universe. The heated towel racks with cute warnings like: What A Hot Rack We Have!; or, Don’t Touch My Rack! The Smart Toilets that go beyond a place to go to the bathroom and verge on some sort of water-based one person theme park, with all manner of switches and buttons and things that heat up and shoot out water.

Things weren’t going well in the bathroom. I’d shaved and now the sink was full of water with no sign whatsoever about how to drain it. There were no knobs or levers or handles or plungers of any sort whatsoever at all. At one point I even resorted to trying to pry the drain up with a fork. (Why did I have a fork? I don’t really know, but when I reached into the inside pocket of my jacket I poked myself with one. At some point along my journey I had absentmindedly thought it a good idea to put a fork in my jacket.) In the end I accidentally figured it out. You had to push on the drain in a certain way, in a way not at all intuitive, sort of like the way you would poke a dead shake if you weren’t sure it was actually dead, and it would just pop up.

Whew!

My relief was more than was called for. And, as it would turn out, also premature: the bathroom was only getting started. Which brings us to the stripper pole. The shower was like this: a big terrarium of glass, a stripper pole, and three chrome knobs. No instructions of any sort could be found anywhere. The knobs were horizontal. I tried the one on the left. Nothing happened. I tried the one on the right. Nothing happened. I wondered briefly if there might be someone in a nearby room whose shower had inexplicably started running. Then I turned the middle knob and all hell broke loose. As I was exploring how to use the shower, as opposed to the actual using of the thing, I had left the shower door open. Well, the stripper pole was, in its entirety one long shower head, and it came strikingly alive. Water shot out in vast sheets, and the water pressure was that of the type found in hoses used to disband riots. It shot out at me and through the open shower door and into the bedroom beyond.

In my panic I began pounding on the knobs. This didn’t accomplish anything and every second the water was not turned off the room was getting more and more drenched. It was an evil demonic entity, this shower. A Stephen King short story. I sloshed around and finally thought to close the shower door with myself inside. I was soaked to the bone. Which, you know, is the entire purpose of a shower. Unfortunately I still had all my clothes on. I was only lucky that I wasn’t wearing my shoes.

The shower, I must say, wasn’t all that pleasant. And the placement of the shower door opposite the shower head was surely a design flaw. The room was only recently renovated, so this shower was probably so cutting edge they hadn’t ever tested it for practicality. In fact, they probably got some sort of bulk discount for buying the showers before they were really ready. This was the sort of shower one would expect in a state penitentiary, not a five-star hotel.

My room was soaked of course, and my jacket, which I’d laid out on the bed hoping it might de-wrinkle itself, was a sodden mess. It smelled like a wet dog. I took my clothes off and took a shower. I heard a low mournful wailing, and then some strange tinkling sounds, all around me, ominous and getting closer…and then what sounded like an angry train whistle followed by a searing pain on my left ankle. I had apparently, in my knob turning, managed to turn on the steam room.

I can understand that management didn’t want to gum up the sleekness of the shower by putting signs on the knobs so people would actually know what they were doing. If there were signs on the knobs, I would have looked at them, rolled my eyes, and said, “What kind of fools do they think we are that we can’t use a shower?” But without them the shower seemed designed to maim and kill—some sort of diabolic lab experiment.

Somehow, because I am a stickler for punctuality, I made it to dinner on time, my sloshy dinner jacket notwithstanding. There I found my travel companions, all equally wet and bruised from their bathroom encounters. It’s one of those little amazing things about travel, where even the most common of daily rituals, like shaving and taking a shower can become an exotic experience.

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