Soggy and crowded
Indignity Vol. 4, No. 144
ANDY ROONEY 2.0 DEP'T.
There Are Not Enough Places to Hang Up Towels in Hotels
ABOVE IS A picture of a towel bar in the hotel room where I'm currently staying. Or rather, it's a picture of the towel bar, the only towel bar. The bar is wide enough to hold one (1) of the hotel's bath towels, folded in half, and it's possible to jam a hand towel over the side of the bar, as has been done here, if you're not particular about how wadded up the hand towel gets.
There is also a card hanging from the bar that reads "Help save energy and water by hanging up your towels to reuse them." Above that, because the hotel is in Quebec, it says "Aidez-nous à économiser l'eau et l'énergie en suspendant vos serviettes pour les réutiliser." Suspendant my serviettes where, exactly? This room has two double beds and a twin-sized fold-out bed, capable of sleeping five people, and it came with four sets of towels, hand and bath. And for all those potential hotel visitors and their towels, it offers this one towel bar, plus a single towel peg on the bathroom door.
This is not some Gallic-Canadian point of perversity. Every hotel is like this now. They encourage you piously to keep your towels off the floor and out of the hotel laundry, for the sake of the planet, and then they don't give you anywhere to put them instead. Two hanging spots to eight towels is a pretty normal ratio—"normal" in the sense that it's what the hotels generally do, not normal in the sense that it's a sane or rational approach to managing towels.
It's true that towel bars can be structurally shaky and hard to maintain. But Home Depot sells a two-pronged hook for robes or towels—rather than the single peg the hotel uses—for $3.47. The hook is supposed to be able to hold 90 pounds, far beyond the weight of two fully saturated bath towels. The hotel could put three of them on the door, providing space to hang six towels, for less than $11. Or if that feels too crowded, it could just put two on the door and stick up more of them somewhere else. It's not as if there's any shortage of space on the walls.
Look at all that room where towels could go! And that's before you consider all the wall space outside the bathroom. Would it look messy to hang towels on hooks out there? Well, right now, they're thrown over the chairs in the main room, instead.
How can hotels possibly be too cheap to do this? This particular hotel claims its pillows are worth $129 apiece at retail, and it stacks so many pillows on the beds you either sprain your neck in the middle of the night or knock the extras to the floor.
If you want people to reuse towels to save the climate (or maybe so you can cut back on the hours for your hotel laundry workers, who can say?), then give your hotel guests a place to hang up their towels to dry. All of their towels.
WEATHER REVIEWS
New York City to Montreal, August 19, 2024
[No stars] It was too warm and damp to be wearing long pants out in the Manhattan streets, but the forecast for the drive said shorts would be regrettable by the end. About a hundred miles north of the city, through the open-roofed corridor of green, some of the sumac had turned red. Further on, the sky ahead turned charcoal gray, with a veil of the same gray trailing below it. The rain hit; a brief tour of the lower settings of the Chrysler Pacifica's wipers led inexorably to the top one, and even that was not enough to clear the deluge. The already wallowing suspension of the minivan added an occasional shimmy as the sheet of water on the roadway grew deeper and the speedometer kept dropping. The other traffic was spectral, if not guesswork. The bludgeoning softened, the van gathered speed through the green mountains and their ragged mists, and then a renewed bludgeoning came down. Planned arrival times and itineraries attenuated and fell away as the storms ebbed and surged again. How much of the standing water on the floor of the gas station restroom had come in from the storm, and how much had originated in the room itself, was impossible to judge and unpleasant to consider. The violence gave out with a salvo of thunder and lightning, and all that was blowing in the windows at the passport-control stop was ordinary rainfall. The wild, drenching storms in the rocky spectacle of the Adirondacks had become flat pissing rain on the flatness of Quebec. A pocket of foliage tipped into autumn colors went by. The view crossing the St. Lawrence seemed as if it would have been stirring, if it hadn't been shrouded in gray. A trailer-less tractor cab raised a fountain of spray between its wheels as high as its own roof. The rain fell on the clogged traffic as the map display said the airport terminal was one minute away, and it was still falling an hour later when the terminal was still one minute away.
EASY LISTENING DEP'T.
CLICK ON THIS box to find the Indignity Morning Podcast archive.
TOM SCOCCA
SANDWICH RECIPES DEP'T.
WE PRESENT INSTRUCTIONS in aid of the assembly of a sandwich selected from The Swedish, French, American Cook Book, by Mrs. Maria Mathilda Ericsson Hammond, published in 1918, and now in the Public Domain and available at archive.org for the delectation of all.
Rolled Almond Sandwiches (Sandwiches aux Amandes, roules)
One cup mayonnaise dressing, one half cup peeled and finely chopped almonds.
Cut bread in very thin slices; spread with the mayonnaise dressing; sprinkle with the chopped almonds; roll about three inches in length and three inches around; decorate with three bands of Spanish pepper all around. Arrange on a paper doily on a platter; garnish with parsley and serve for afternoon tea. [Can also be served for luncheon or dinner with the entree].
If you decide to prepare and attempt to enjoy a sandwich inspired by this offering, be sure to send a picture to indignity@indignity.net.
MARKETING DEP'T.
Supplies are really and truly running low of the second printing of 19 FOLK TALES, still available for gift-giving and personal perusal! Sit in the crushing heat with a breezy collection of stories, each of which is concise enough to read before the thunderstorms start.
LESS THAN 5 COPIES LEFT: HMM WEEKLY MINI-ZINE, Subject: GAME SHOW, Joe MacLeod’s account of his Total Experience of a Journey Into Television, expanded from the original published account found here at Hmm Daily. The special MINI ZINE features other viewpoints related to an appearance on, at, and inside the teevee game show Who Wants to Be A Millionaire, and is available for purchase at SHOPULA.
