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As much as I enjoy traveling, my love for meeting new people is constantly undercut by the burden of waking up in the morning in strangers’ houses. No matter how hospitable my hosts might be, their kindness falls short when I’m faced with the challenges presented by a foreign shower.
My shower at home functions as one would expect it to: I turn a knob and water comes out of the showerhead. (Granted, the water never seems to be the appropriate temperature, but at least the mechanism makes sense.)
However, my humble bathroom is no match for some of the swankier varieties I encounter in other people’s homes. I’ve seen apparatuses that would more befit a NASA launch pad, and the complexity of my early morning battles is always compounded by the absence of my brain, which I apparently abandoned the previous night.
When I was shown my lodgings the afternoon before, the host cheerfully guided me about the house, and when we viewed the bathroom in the comfortable light of day, I naïvely assumed the shower would function like…an actual shower.
Flash forward to the next morning, when I always find myself naked and crouched over the shower’s surplus of levers. Maybe it’s my nearsightedness, which results when failing eyes are bereft of their contact lenses, but I swear that when I looked at the shower yesterday, it had fewer components.
Bravely, I proceed with my general strategies for dealing with temperamental objects.
First, I sweet-talk the shower with coaxes and caresses: a futile attempt to garner its sympathy. When the cruel shower inevitably ignores me, I get angry and threaten it. This tactic, too, proves unsuccessful, for when I lash out and kick it, I set myself even further back. Now, not only am I naked, tired, frustrated, and in desperate need of a shower, but my goddamn toe also hurts.
It’s as if the shower’s hostility is premature payback for all the difficulty I will inevitably cause my hosts, for meals, transportation, and a skyrocketed water bill will follow my stay at their home. The secret resentment my hosts feel towards me, therefore, trickles through the passive-aggressive shower…out of which I’ve still failed to get water.
Eventually, after I’m broken and crying on the bathtub’s floor, the powers that be take pity on me and I stumble upon the correct switch. For a bright, sparkling moment, as I joyfully watch the water rush towards me, I am convinced of the existence of a god. Before my long-awaited victory cry can leave my mouth, however, it changes into one of agony as the water inevitably comes out scalding.
Despite my arrogance, the shower ultimately has the upper hand, and I emerge from the nightmare that is a stranger’s bathroom twenty minutes later thoroughly hard-boiled.