Wednesday, April 13, 2016

When did deep-dish showers become a thing?

We were in South Africa a few months ago and I encountered something I had never seen before: a shower with a floor pan that was so heavily graded that it was like standing in a giant salad bowl.  The drain was nearly a full foot lower than the edges of the shower.  And this was apparently not an anomaly.  We stayed in two places in South Africa, and they both had this "feature".  It was incredibly uncomfortable, to say nothing of dangerous.  In one case the floor tiles were smooth, and there was a real slipping hazard when they were wet.

I wrote it off as a South African thing and went home feeling smugly superior that we here in the U.S. would never engage in such silliness.

Then a few weeks ago we went to Atlanta, and stayed at a Marriott which had exactly the same kind of "deep dish" shower!  At least this one had some texturing on the tile that made it harder to slip, but it was still incredibly annoying to have to shower while standing on a slope.

Of course, every shower has a have a little bit of a grade so that the water will drain, but making the grade so extreme that you could use the floor of the shower as a splish-and-splash slide is going waaaay too far.  I have seen probably hundreds, possibly thousands of showers in my life.  They have all drained perfectly well without putting me at risk of going down the drain along with the water.

I'm not sure what is more remarkable, the fact that this stupid design exists at all, or the fact that in many decades of traveling I've never seen one before, and then I'd suddenly encounter it three times in a row in two different countries.  The odds against that have to be unfathomably low.

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