Is it a ploy to keep old minds nimble? But even young people strike problems: we once did a house swap with a young couple from Rome, when we were living in a rented place in Vienna. At the end of the swap, we discovered that our swapees, if that's the word, had never worked out how the taps in our upstairs bathroom functioned (although until then, oddly enough, we'd never seen them as particularly wacky - the taps, I mean). They - the swapees - spent three weeks in our house, unshowered and unbathed. I'm glad to say we only found this out over the telephone - they must have been quite pungent by the end of their stay.
Come now! Don't you know? It's the built-in karioke microphone for singing 'Timewarp'!
ReplyDeleteLooks like a robot's soprano saxophone.
ReplyDeleteThe casino and university toilets in this city often have motion sensor taps, which probably satisfies the mind of anyone worried about hygiene (the person before you can have leprosy or pustules or anything they like and you're never going to come into contact with it) but when they fail they fail solid, there's nothing to twist or adjust or try, nothing to do except stand there waving your hands in a dry basin and wondering when you should cut your losses and step over to the sink next door.
ReplyDeleteChris, now you come to mention it, perhaps it was and I should have looked elsewhere for the tap.
ReplyDeleteUmbagollah, I never thought about the leprosy aspect - which is undermined by the presence of doors that hands have to touch. When the taps don't work, it's never occurred to me that they've broken. I always think it must be not working out how to use them properly, which demonstrates an unhealthy subservience to the authority of technology in my soul, I now realise.
There is an American company, Moehne, I think, that has just the looniest advertisements in house magazines--after the one with a model dressed in chain mail dress made of shower-curtain rings, I lost track. Yet their faucets were always easily maintained.
ReplyDeleteI dislike taps without washers. I dare say that in favorable circumstances a washerless faucet will serve long and without problems, save the rain forest by not requiring rubber washers, etc. But when they start to drip, you seem to need at $20 cartridge rather than a 5-cent washer.
I was about to write, "But they could make motion sensor doors too --" and then I realised what a bad idea that was.
ReplyDeleteGeorge, I never even knew that washers were being made redundant.
ReplyDeleteUmbagollah, it crossed my mind too - it could create some excellent farce.