You know?
Experience pays off. The more you have the more things you know about.
In line with that, the more things you know about, the more things you know how to fix, or get around, or fudge into compliance with your needs, and the more things you can just put up with.
Take my shower. Please. (Just kidding.)
No, I'm not kidding – I don't like it. But I can get by.
What's the problem then? I hear you ask. Well, It's another example of Not Quite™. I'm sure that part of the problem, if I can really call this a problem, is that the building I'm living in is old. Maybe a hundred years, give or take a century. It's old. Fine. Old buildings are funky.
So the room I'm renting has been retro-fitted into this old building, which has been renovated into a hostel. Or hotel. Or hostal as they say here, which is more like a tiny hotel that is OK but not as fancy as a hotel, and also tries to lean away from the flophouse ambiance typical of hostels. Fine again.
But part of the retro-fitting was to add bathrooms, which are handy, no doubt. I have access to a bathroom and it works, which again is handy, see, but there's this thing.
The floor of the shower is not level, and it shouldn't be level. The floor should have a low spot in it, and the drain should be at that point. But it isn't – the drain, I mean.
See the problem?
Puddling.
When I take a shower, I like to run the water. Running water while taking a shower is kind of the point, right? So when I do that, the water puddles in the bottom of the shower because its muscles aren't strong enough for it to climb uphill to reach the drain.
Generally speaking, water loves to go down a drain any chance it gets, but since the drain in my shower is uphill, the poor water just can't get there. A lot of the water anyway, so it puddles.
Other than that, the shower is fine, plus one more thing. Which is that I have to share this shower with other guests here, and who knows what they do once they're in there with the door closed, right? Am I right?
OK, I'm right. And when they are done showering they leave a puddle behind, which sits for hours and hours, waiting. For me. And then I go in there and try not to stand in it, which is more awkward than I like, because, you know, when I shower I like to wash and go, not dance around the edges of a puddle left by someone else who might have been doing who-knows-what.
Which, to get back to the point, is the real issue with a lot of things here.
You buy a building, and renovate it, and turn it into a really nice little hostal, and then a bunch of details like this slip through your fingers like a slippery wet bar of soap that goes shooting across the room if you try to grab it, and you say to yourself Well – it's probably OK, but it isn't, really, so every day forever after someone has to dance around that puddle and all the other odd little things that you glossed over while saying, over and over as you committed your mistakes Well – it's probably OK. But it isn't, is it?
No.
So stuff like that.
Not quite right.