Upside Down Ignorance??????

Because of the type of work I do as a consultant, I am in hotel rooms 75% of my time. I noticed a long time ago when hotels started to install the nice arched curtain rods in the showers. I really like these because they give so much more room when you are in the shower. However, my anal qualities begin to get the best of me when I noticed that the shower rod was installed upside down. When these are installed there is a little raised part at the end on “top” that the shower curtain rings slide over on both ends.

 

The reason for this is so the ends will stay in place and you won’t have a gap between the shower curtain and the wall and this keeps water from getting all over the floor. The one drawback with these curtain rods is that they have a tendency to sag so that the center of the rod sits a little lower than the ends making the shower curtain want to move to the center. This little problem was corrected by the inventor my making these humps on the ends the rod to keep the curtain where it belongs and the floor dry.

The first time I noticed this I just laughed to myself and thought that the maintenance people made a mistake, but 12 hotels later I started to wonder if I was the only one in the world that understood what those little humps where for.

I began to think there was some special reason that every shower rod in every hotel was installed upside down. I started searching on Google for a valid explanation to this mass phenomena, and what did I find… Nothing at all except for a few other people that noticed this same thing in hotels all over the world.

The funny part is that hotels are beginning to have a issue with water leaking on the floor from the shower. Obviously because the curtain won’t stay on the ends as I have explained due to the fact that the shower rods ends are all upside down. But, to my surprise the solution that the hotels have come up with is to spend more money and install splash shields on all the tubs to help combat the mysterious water puddles they have started to see in everyone's room. Think of the cost of a hotel chain buying splash shields for every tub, extra time in room cleanup, and how much extra laundry because of all the wet towels that are used trying to sop up the puddles. I can just imagine how much money Marriott alone would save by just flipping the ends the right way on their shower rods.