Steve's blog

Back in February and March, Jo and I went on vacation for 2 weeks touring California and Nevada. We had an awesome time and we got to see and do lots of fun stuff. I'm not going to go into all the details, as it's a long time ago now...! I've got a massive set of photos online, though.

However, two things struck me as odd when we were there. I'm travelling quite regularly to the US these days due to my work in Linaro, but these still seemed new when I saw them this February/March. These are, admittedly trivial things, but they really stood out for me. Maybe I'm a little weird? :-)

Curved shower curtain tracks

curvy!

I guess I'm not the only one who's been annoyed by shower curtains sticking to me in the shower, but I'd not really paid much thought to it until now. Suddenly, as of maybe 18 months ago I'm seeing most hotel bathrooms replacing the straight curtain track with a curved one, to stop that happening. This photo shows that process with both tracks visible...

Waterproof/washable TV remotes

shiny!

This one really surprised me. As Jo will attest, I have a little bit of an obsession with TVs and set-top boxes in hotel rooms. This dates from my time working for Amino where we made set-top boxes, and I got into the habit of checking what products were in the hotels I stayed in. I've seen a range of weird and wonderful setups over the years, but never this one before. In two of the hotels on our trip, they had replaced the normal TV remotes with washable/wipe-down ones. Weird...

01:02 :: # :: /misc :: 4 comments

Comments

Re: Weird things I've noticed in hotels lately...
jordi wrote on Fri, 14 Nov 2014 08:10

I figure we don't *really* want to know what people do with hotel TV remotes. :D

Re: Weird things I've noticed in hotels lately...
rjc wrote on Fri, 14 Nov 2014 09:26

One word - hygiene!

It's easy to use some sort of disinfectant in order to clean it. Think of keyboards use in bio-med - same principle.

Re: Weird things I've noticed in hotels lately...
Anselm wrote on Fri, 14 Nov 2014 10:04

There are studies which have shown that the TV remote is usually the grossest, dirtiest, most bacteria-infected piece of kit in a hotel room. It makes the inside of the toilet bowl look positively appealing. People should really be putting on latex gloves when they want to change the channel. The hotels probably want to avoid being sued by someone who caught Ebola from their TV remote.

Re: Weird things I've noticed in hotels lately...
Andy Cater wrote on Fri, 14 Nov 2014 21:59

Curved shower curtains - perhaps they hide the knife-wielding maniac better / don't cling to the body as it falls ...?

Waterproof remotes will also survive being left on a table wet with beer / wine - but I don't fancy the longevity of any contacts and American carbonated soda drinks :)

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