We Are Special
We are special people, with special needs. Like oversized bathrooms for wheelchairs.
And toilets with special support bars for the handicapped.
Apparently, we somehow got “upgraded” to the disability sweet of the hotel here in Madrid.
I don’t know too many handicapped people, but what little I do know, I can say with 100% certainty that the disabled dislike wet towels just as much as everyone else dislikes wet towels. So it is with great surprise and disbelief that the shower inside this special shower stall acts as if it has a mind of it’s own.
Like most showers in Europe it comes with a detachable shower head. I’ve never had a problem with the fixed shower head variety, but the detachable version sort of makes sense, especially for those with limited mobility as one might find in this particular bathroom. But herein lies the rub… The concept of a shower-door is in a perpetual prototype stage throughout most of Europe. It’s as if they started thinking of a way to keep water from the faucet off the bathroom floor — got about halfway there — and then stopped in mid-thought. Probably distracted by their eureka moment of a detachable shower head! What I’m trying to get at here is that all the showers only have HALF of a shower door. It’s bewildering!
Taking a shower here is like those torturous games your older sibling would make you play as a child. Make the wrong move, get pulverized. Make the right move, and get pulverized as well. Or so I’ve heard. I was usually the pulverizer, not the pulverizee. Sorry Alice! Anywho, when showering in these contraptions it’s a constant battle to see how much water you can get on yourself, without getting any on the bathroom floor. In my experience, the bathroom floor usually ends up winning. And I end up in second place with wet socks. Ugh.
To make matters worse (yes, things are about to get worse than wet socks) the towel rack in this particular bathroom is on the adjacent wall. On the towel rack are two nice and clean towels fresh from housekeeping. There is about 6 feet between the shower head and the towel racks. One would have to deliberatly take the shower head and aim it directly at the towel rack in order to get the towels wet. No sane person would ever do such a thing. But just what would an insane shower do? I’m glad you asked, as I’m about to show you in this YouTube video exactly what happened to me earlier today.
So there I was in my birthday suite, all lathered up in soapy goodness. Just enjoying my morning shower, thinking of how lucky I am to even be standing there showering in Madrid at that very moment. The shower lasts the normal 5-6 minutes and I finish off the morning ritual just as I normally do by rinsing off all the excess suds. I reach for the water valve and push it towards the off position as the water pressure responds and drops to a lite trickle of the remaining drops in the shower head. I start to motion towards the dry towels on the rack when I hear a rapid succession of clicks.
*clickclickclickclickclickclick*
I turn my head towards the sound and the shower head has gone from the 12 o’clock position at which I left it, rotating quickly to 1 o’clock, 2 o’clock, 3… it was all happening so fast, 4, 5, 6 and just as gravity had worked it’s magic and caused the shower head to spin a complete 180 degrees, somehow the water came back on all by itself and resumed it’s previous water pressure state! So now the shower head is speweing water like a fountain all over the clean/dry towels!!! What the hell man!? I was just about to use one of those to dry off!!! Now what the heck am I supposed to do!?
Sheesh! Now I have to walk around the rest of the day feeling like a cripple that dried off with a damp towel! Limping around in wet socks. This sucks!