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Comment by stavros

2 days ago

Was it made of glass?

I've stayed in a hotel where the toilet door was made of glass, and had big gaps. I was staying with an acquaintance, so things were really awkward. It didn't help that the shower was right in front of this frosted glass, so the person's entire silhouette was very visible when showering.

Another time, in Amsterdam, I stayed at an AirBnB where the toilet was on the balcony, and had a glass door (non-frosted) in the kitchen. Yep, if you needed to go, and someone was cooking, or was a neighbour, they were looking right at you.

I've seen this. Sometimes, they have curtains. I don't really understand what the point is though. It's definitely not price. I would imagine that it's costlier to add a window to a wall than just to brick it. I thought it was to allow one to watch the TV while taking a shower or a bath. It's the most reasonable thing I could come up with.

  • What I believe:

    It's to encourage e.g. two coworkers to get separate rooms instead of one room with separate beds. The increase in revenue is more than the construction cost.

    • That's equal parts evil and clever. And completely plausible. You've just reduced my faith in humanity a little. Thanks. :-/

Review and vote with your wallet and your feet

In Hyperion, the character Martin Silenus is rich enough that he lives in a novelty palace where all the rooms are connected by teleporters. As a joke, the bathroom is a wallless raft on an ocean world.

Outside of the realm of science fiction, my sister followed a TV show for a while that was basically a set of advertisements for a modular home company. One episode featured the installation of a small home on a remote British island; the shower was a pipe outside the house itself.

  • We installed an outdoor shower at our house. There's nothing as nice as a cold shower outdoors on a really hot day. It feels so luxurious that I can pretend I'm a rich person instead of lower- to mid-middle class.

    We live way out in the boonies, so that helps.

  • I wasn't expecting to read a Hyperion reference in this thread, such a great book.

    (And if you haven't read the book you can guess what could possibly go wrong with this setup.)

    • I feel like that house was a _bit_ of a Chekhov's gun; I think it was the first point in the story where what was going to happen became clear to me.

      (This wasn't Simmons' invention, incidentally; Larry Niven did it first.)