Water Sports

Every morning and even some evenings, unsuspecting travelers are involved in an activity of high risk. It is a game that has reached epidemic proportions. It must be stopped.

It is a game I call: “Shower Roulette.”

Perhaps even you, dear reader, have unwittingly participated in this endeavor.

You step into a shower at a hotel or AirBnB. If it is a combination tub and shower, there will be the bath faucet and then, of course, some kind of shower head. There will be a lever somewhere that diverts the water to one or the other. How that lever works is never clear. Perhaps it twists clockwise to channel the stream to the shower, or perhaps it twists counterclockwise.

In the good old days, there would be two other handles, one on the left for hot water and one on the right for cold. The degree to which you opened the valves also controlled the volume, or water pressure. With these handles you could dip your toe in the water, so to speak. When it reached a temperature and a pressure you found satisfactory, well then let it rip out of the shower head.

But just to make things interesting, the water fixture designers (and who are they, anyway?) decided that we might just as well combine the hot and cold water valves with the lever diverting water up or down. Again, no clear convention on which direction to turn these things. And how is the pressure of the liquid controlled? Anybody’s guess, because none of this is standardized among the manufacturers of these contraptions.

(We have a Geneva Convention so that the world can agree on war crimes. But the shower roulette atrocity? No one seems to care.)

But wait, this apparently wasn’t enough of a challenge for the designer gods. They decided that what would be really cool is to go over the top — literally — and add another dimension for water flow to be dumped right on the top of your head.

So now we have three potential ways to spray the water, which undoubtedly will come with the force of a fire hose and at a temperature reminiscent of a melting glacier. Will the icy water attack your toes? Will it spray directly into your face? Or will it just act as a proxy for the “bucket challenge” that was so fashionable a few years ago, and dump directly on your noggin.

Good luck figuring it out.