More "...last night", but...
Hotel taps. (Specifically mixer-taps.)
Four actual turnble taps. Two straight from the wall either side of the bathtub spout. Did not use (I was showering), but it's anyone's guess whether they act as Hot and Cold or Quantity and Temperature.
The shower unit is (differently!) two almost identical taps on wall-emerging pipes, these connected by a bar between them (from the middle of which leads to the flexible piping to the showerhead). No sign of what the taps did (minimalist/modernist chrome thing), best guess would be Hot+Cold, but (it turns out) it was the Quantity+Temperature version. (I checked closely, later, and absolutely no indication what.)
Earlier, the sink-tap (the type with a lift-angle for quantity, twist for relative temperature mix) took a while to establish which twist-way was cold (to fill the hotel kettle, with the intrinsic British distrust of hot-water for potable purposes). Both full-directions twists would give stuttering flows (usually indicative of hot-water systems with vapour-bubbles up the line), and it took about thirty seconds for the temperature to 'prove' itself (started off cold, but maybe getting warm, swivels the other way and it got warmer, but that turned out to be the warm-supply finally exiting the exceedingly long spout, it got cold again... but I had to be sure, so I swivelled it the original way again and waited another good half minute to confirm that it got hot, then twisted it back to cold and had to wait for tens of seconds for the hot water to finally get out, so I could stick the kettle under the tap to get the cold water I wanted in order to take the kettle back out of the bathroom (<=UK sense) to place on its electrical-connection stand and boil the water in it in order to make my evening coffee).
Look, I know us Brits are accused of not liking mixer taps but (apart from the "which water are you getting, the fresh mains water or the stuff that's been taken from that but shoved through potential bacteria-supporting warm-water cisterns" bit), I wish that there could at least be a consistency to which way they work (which pair of controls, and often which directions do what), at least on all the fancy ones that go for the stylistic option of not having red/blue slices of plastic pointing in the direction[1], instead just being fairly featureless/brutalist chrome 'chunks'.
When you're only in a particular hotel-room for one night, you really don't get the opportunity to get used to whichever iteration you have to abide by. And this kind of problem is definitely worse, the higher the number of stars... A terraced-house B&B three roads back from the sea-front of a once-great seaside resort will (as well as having ill-fitting single-glazed sash windows that need a good paint) probably have... well, actual hot and cold taps. The conference-centre accomodation (in the middle of the countryside (and its own golf course!) that's handy for practically no kind of actual holiday that doesn't involve golf or business meetings) is gonna be the shiny-chrome-type. And the really posh places probably go for polished granite wet-rooms with all-stone fixtures and fittings that are basically incomprehensible without the assistance of the introductory maid/butler. (For the record, no butlers in my particular stay-over. And I don't play golf.)
First world problems, I know, but glad to be home with plumbing I'm actually used to. It's even warmer here than down there.
(As to trolleys. In the middle of the pandemic, one of the supermarkets I frequent suddenly lost almost all its baskets, forcing anyone with even a small shop (well, more than a couple of handfuls) to go for the trolleys. It seemd that there was a spate of "not buying a plastic bag, just walking out of the store with the bought goods still in the basket", perhaps by going through the self-scanning tills where it wasn't odd to not dump goods on a conveyor. Took a few weeks to get a fresh supply of baskets, which were initially all 'tagged' to set off the RFID security arches. Another supermarket either got similarly hit, or donated its metal baskets to somewhere that needed them again, and got some stupidly-proportioned/shaped plastic things (strange curve to them, suddenly couldn't hold a couple of bottles of pop at the bottom of them, for example), though they later seem to reappear. Might have just missed their own particular carrier-crisis...)
[1] Though even that can be confusing. With a 'dial' scale, do you turn the tap in the direction of the indicator-appearance you want or do you turn it to bring the bit of the indicator you more want into the uppermost/frontmost position?
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Topic: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O (Read 15458980 times)