A Turkish Shower

Let Life in the Boomer Lane start by saying that, during her recent trip to Istanbul, she spent a lot of time glued to CNN International, keeping track of Irma. Her son, various friends, and other family members were impacted. But, at some point, LBL did need to address personal hygiene take a shower.  She left the mayhem of the TV screen and entered the bathroom of her hotel. It was in this bathroom that her own personal water-induced mayhem began.

Now Husband announced his intention of taking a nap.  LBL believed this to be the perfect time to take a shower. Now Husband then laid down and, as was his usual custom, was sound asleep in a matter of seconds.  LBL walked into the bathroom and surveyed the shower.

Loyal readers will, by now, know that LBL and anything even distantly related to technology are a poor match. They are such a poor match, in fact, that if they had met for dinner after meeting on a dating site, LBL would have excused herself from the restaurant before the meal arrived, gone to the rest room, and crawled out the window to freedom.

Back to the story at hand. When LBL entered the hotel bathroom, she was confronted with a small tub/shower combination, with three sliding panels above the tub. She slid one aside, creating a fairly narrow opening. She tried to keep sliding it, but it wouldn’t budge. She tried the panel on the right with the same result. Now she was facing two openings, neither of which was wide enough for her to enter.

She closed the panels and tried to attack the problem from the middle. The middle panel would slide either way, but now the end panels wouldn’t move. She was determined to prevail, in spite of having never in her life been able to solve any problem involving technology. In her optimism, she reached into the shower and turned it on, quickly got the correct temperature (thereby giving herself a false sense of ability) and continued to tackle the sliding doors.

As she did, she realized that the water wasn’t draining from the tub. She tried to deal with that issue but quickly gave up. She went back to the panel problem. She came up with various solutions to fit her body into an opening that was narrower than her body, and which clearly defied the laws of physics. Various body parts were involved in various attempts, all of which stayed firmly attached to the main part of her body and continued to prevent her from entering the shower.

Realizing that she would never be able to create the opening she needed to access the shower, she decided to simply stick her head into the opening and at least be able to wash her hair. As she stuck her head in, she noted two things. One was that the tub was now about three-quarters full. The other was that, with her head stuck into the shower area, she had no way to reach her arm in and turn on the handheld nozzle that she would need.

She knew then that all was lost.  LBL woke up Now Husband, who was able to immediately open the panels all the way, using the same techniques that LBL suspected he used for all of her computer and TV remote problems. After that, he ran back to the bed to complete his nap. LBL leapt into the tub, by then about 90% full, to take her shower.

The shower now became a version of the old TV show, Beat the Clock. LBL applied shampoo to her hair and lathered (no conditioner followed, as that would take too long) and completed the rest of the shower (no leisurely thoughts allowed here, just pure efficiency) and got out of the tub just as it reached the critical, about-to-overflow level. Still unable to open the drain, she did manage, in desperation, to pull the entire plug mechanism out of the tub.

She exited the bathroom clean and with all body parts intact.  Even better, she realized that she had remembered to rinse off, even while distracted by the rising water level. And she didn’t injure herself getting out of the bathtub (the sides of Turkish tubs are quite high) in her frenzy to end the shower before a water disaster.

Alert readers will recall that LBL’s last post was about underwear.  She assures you now that she has not decided to change the theme of this blog to appeal to your more prurient interests. Future posts will be PG-rated.  Or at least she plans to have them be so. As she is not in control of which events of her life might interest readers, she isn’t making any promises.