On top of the thought chain

Each morning, somewhere between maneuvering guerrilla style out of my bed, so I don’t wake up my cats, and mixing my banana flavored milk with cornflakes, there is a very awkward moment. It happens the moment I enter my shower cabin and turn on the water. And it is caused by two things:

1. The water in the hose hasn’t been in contact with the hot water since the last usage. But it is in contact with some metal valve parts. So it’s cooled down to near absolute zero.
2. It physically impossible to remove your hand before the stream of water hits some part of your body. (Or at least at that early in the morning)

Because of this I get to know every day what Mr. Joe the lab monkey feels like when pressing the wrong button and getting a high voltage shock applied directly to it’s brain. Instead of a nice banana or some other sweet monkey snack.

Now of course you could nudge the showerhead away from you. But this will result in a even angrier attack the moment the hose gets pressurized. Okay.. take it off, point it to the floor and then turn the water on. Which isn’t that much of a hassle, I agree. But I mean come on, we can have a man in spaceship twitter about his view of the Palau islands 200 miles above earth. But we cant fix this? The reason for being human is to adapt the world around you. Improving stuff (for ourselves) is where we are good at.

Now, it could be that the whole design of the shower isn’t the way it should be. First let’s look at the modern toilets. How long did it take before someone finally came up with the siphon and stopped the pleasant odor of sewers. Image how happy people were the day that they only had to smell the scent of the intestinal flora from the previous visitor, instead of the whole city. Just by adding 2 curves to a tube. Small adjustments to improve life.

Now for the shower. Why not put the tabs somewhere else then right below the sprinkles from hell. Some might complain it’s not fully Feng-Shui compliant. Plus most houses, at least the ones owned by clean people, are already fitted with showers. So replumping the whole thing for this is a silly idea. Mhhh.. you could install some qooker but that is also a quite expensive solution for such a small problem. Plus getting 100 degrees Celcius water on your skins will make you feel what the small lab rat sitting in the cage next to Mr. Joe is going trough.

But it might be even simpler. For the kitchen you can buy these really ugly cooking alarms. Most of these food preparation timers have designs like fruits, eggs or even vases. Yuck, but it again shows my point.. why spend time looking at clock when we can invent something to do it for us. Now these things operate on the simple concept that when you turn them, they get wound up. Releasing the spring with a fixed interval. How much effort would it be for shower tab makers to incorporate something like this. So the moment I turn the dial to start my artificial rain, a 2 second spring gets released. And when the time is over, there is no PING but water. And when I turn it back, to stop my hi-tech rain dance, “Click!”. Ready for the next turn. Costs would be below cents and it would al least stopped me from writing this.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 12th, 2010 at 12:04 and is filed under Ideas. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.