If you are Japanese, then this is a bathroom

 As I have not trained to be a commercial pilot, I find it hard to use the bathrooms in new hotels.

Bathrooms here seem to be full of buttons, switches, knobs, taps, rods, handles, levers and joy sticks, some of which seem to be there because there was a buy-one-take-one free offer.  The only thing missing is a geographical positioning system.

And even as I find my way around this instrument panel, the thing that drives me nuts is that the bathroom wall that separates it from the main room is made of glass.  You can therefore come to  one of three clear conclusions:

Conclusion 1: Hotel architects can’t see through glass

Conclusion 2: Hotel architects are dim on the uptake (unlike the lights in the bathroom)

Conclusion 3: Hotel architects are dim on the uptake and can’t see through glass and think that others are as blind as a bat (without Nipah. I don’t know if a bat with Nipah is as blind as a bat without it, but it’s a piece of research I am not enthusiastic about.)

So if you happen to have guests and are taking a shower and press the wrong button, the blinds lift; and you are presented in birthday suit, armed to the teeth with soap, shower gel, conditioner, body lotion, loofah and shampoo, to the mass of visitors (most of whom are on their third drink and hence ready to laugh at anything, pickled morons).  The towel rack is helpfully about thirty feet away, which only strengthens Conclusion 2 above, unless hotel architects dry themselves by whistling loudly and think others do too (in which case refer to Conclusion 2 above). 

Sometime ago, the hotel I stayed in had a secret shower on the ceiling.  Now, in my considered opinion, there should then be a knob in the wall which says, ‘Secret Shower – ice cold water refrigerated in liquid carbon dioxide.  Please look up’ so that there is the excitement of a treasure hunt and you look up and leap out of the way.  But I turned one perfectly normal looking knob, got soaked in water that had just been shipped in from the polar ice cap, and then spent the next ten minutes trying to stop my teeth from involuntary chattering.  This Marriott had, trust me, three showers, one on the ceiling, one flexible contraption that went up and down a rod (which was a wonderful past time once you figured it out and got the right temperature, all of which takes about 24 minutes) and a final shower at knee level.  At knee level?  Are they trying to give you an enema?  (No, I know there is another shower thingy at knee level in the toilet, but I wasn’t referring to that).  I saw later that all three showers had icons showing their location in a nano print that needed an electron microscope, which should compulsorily be provided in each bathroom.  

And the switches in these new bathrooms are embedded in the wall and look like art in the Louvre, but most of them don’t work on two times of the day – before 6 pm and after.  I pressed one of these, thinking (foolishly) that switches mean lights on or off.  But a panel by the side turned to reveal an unkempt beast staring unblinkingly. Quite a shock to see, I tell you, till I realized that it was me staring into a concave shaving mirror.  

So, I am applying for a commercial pilot’s licence.