Sunday, November 25, 2012

Reasons to Be Thankful

Number one: You're not Thomas Sowell.


Kid Kidneys took the stage from Palo Alto to Los Angeles the other day, and landed in one of them new-fangled boardin' houses:
Recently, at a well-known luxury hotel in Los Angeles, I found that something as simple as turning on a television set can require a phone call to the front desk, and then waiting for the arrival of a technician. Then it took another phone call to get a list of which of the dozens of channels were for which networks.

Why the turning on of a television set should be anything other than obvious to a newly arrived hotel guest is apparently a question that never occurred to the people who ran this hotel. Nor did it apparently ever occur to them that someone just arriving from a journey might want to be able to relax, instead of having to cope with complications that the hotel could easily have avoided.
Just pay for the damn porno, Tommy, and don't pretend you couldn't understand the remote just to get your $16.95 back.

Even more confusing for Tom was the Ablutio-Tron 3000:

The next morning, in the shower, I found myself confronted with a dazzling array of knobs and levers, none of which provided any clue as to what they did. The lever rotated and four of the surrounding knobs both rotated and tilted forward and backward.
Tommy called down for a technician on this occasion too, but the hotel was on to him by this time.
Tommy then gets his personal bathrobe stolen and laundered, then bitches about how different lamps have different types of switches, and then flashes back to a problem he had with a hotel light switch "years ago." After a great while, he moves down the coast, to San Diego, where his woes continue in a new venue:
Later I had to fix a toilet that kept running after being flushed. I once had a toilet like that at home, so I knew what to do. But I replaced my malfunctioning toilet at home, unlike the hotel.
So if he didn't replace the crapper, which is what he did when he had the same problem at home, how did he fix it? Or is he bragging that he accomplished a temporary fix, but wasn't stuck with replacing the toilet? Either way, the story makes no sense. Why didn't he just ask for another room?

Link via Sadly, No!.


Update (11/26):  Name of fictional futuristic shower corrected.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

I once had an encounter with what I suppose was the Ablutio-Tron 300 in an Atlanta restaurant. After soaping up my hands I went to the sink and try as I might I could find no way to turn the water on. There were no knobs, no pedals. Nothing that would respond to a push, pull, hand wave, twist, anything. The water was supposed to trickle out a trough pointed in my direction but never did. I finally just wiped the soap off with a mercifully provided paper towel.

Oh, but Sowell is still a dick with too many kidneys on his hands. Maybe a yard sale will clear them out.

parsec

Substance McGravitas said...

It just goes to show that there's no replacement for Andy Rooney.

Montag said...

Sowell was probably just miffed that none of the help offered, unbidden, to wipe his ass after using that infernal toilet.

Usually a long list of trivial complaints stems from one single affront to his majesty, about which he is unwilling to speak publicly for fear of cementing his reputation as a dick.

Unknown said...

The glory of the nimble, responsive private sector!

Anonymous said...

Tom provides an example of the insights that Clownhall is famous for:

"...most people who stay in hotels do so while traveling."

merlallen said...

I used to work at a hotel, you'd be surprised how many people accidentally order porn and accidentally watch 10 or 15 minutes of it. Then call the desk and demand that it be removed from the bill

Anonymous said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.