Things That the World Would Be Better off Without: Hotel Showers

(Original post: July 11, 2010)

Overall, I had an awesome time at clarinet camp and Gainesville in general. Learned some stuff, met some cool people, didn’t freeze to death. At the moment, I’m at my grandparents’ house, being a hermit in my room and enjoying the non-prehistoric, modern, fast computer in here. Due to a lack of anything else to do at the moment, I’m going to go ahead and type the rant I’ve been contemplating since my last trip to UF in April.

For many, many years, I have been on a quest to find the ultimate hotel shower (or at least one that would be good for something besides watering plants). So far, I have not succeeded. Such a shower does not exist in Gainesville, Hattiesburg MS, Orlando, Tampa, Callaway Gardens in Georgia, wherever I stayed in Alabama to take some stupid standardized test, or anywhere else I have traveled to. Grant it, I don’t do much traveling, but I would’ve hoped for something better by now.

The criteria for a decent hotel shower would be as follows:

• You should feel cleaner upon exiting the shower than you did upon entering. Not the other way around. You start off slightly sweaty and grimy, and you exit sweaty and grimy with half a bottle of shampoo still in your hair. This is because of a lack of…
• WATER PRESSURE. This is a biggie. How can you get clean when the showerhead is basically a glorified (broken) lawn sprinkler? The whole point of showering is to apply soap, which is then washed off, taking the grime with it. If there isn’t enough water pressure to get rid of the soap, it stays, along with the grime. Bleh.
• The showerhead should be an environmental disaster. That’s right, you heard me. No more of these stupid “water saving, eco-friendly” bathroom fixtures, especially showerheads. I suppose they do save water, but that’s because they barely use any of it, and it’s dispersed out of so many tiny holes that are so far apart that it looks like a lot of water, even though it isn’t (coupled with a lack of water pressure, this sucks). Look at it this way: You can shower in five or ten minutes with a decent, normal showerhead. With an eco-friendly one, it takes an hour or so, and even then you’re still not clean. By the time you’re done showering, you prolly wasted more water with the eco-friendly one.
• Some sort of traction. Falling on your face in a shower is never fun. I would think hotels would want to make this as difficult as possible, what with liability issues and all, but I guess not. I have some pretty interesting faucet-shaped bruises right now. Stupid perfectly smooth shower floors.
• Bullet holes, mysterious stains, and green stuff are all major no-nos. Ah, the cheap motels we always stay at for band trips. I’m not even kidding you, I swear those were bullet holes in the shower curtain…

Quite honestly, you would be better off sponge-bathing in the sink than you would be trying to use a shower in most hotels. The sink probably has more water pressure and less stuff growing in it. Just a thought.

If you really don’t care that much about your personal hygeine, please disregard this rant. If you think I’m over-dramatizing, take into account that I am extremly bored and also imagine what you would feel like after three days without a decent shower. Otherwise, if you’ve ever seen a hotel shower that actually isn’t totally horrible, please tell me. I feel myself beginning to lose hope.

And don’t even get me started on dorm showers…