on the road with andy rooney

Do you ever wonder if the people who design hotel rooms ever talk with one another?

I suspect they don't. At least, my stay at the Marriott in Fort Lauderdale would suggest they don't.

The hotel itself is pleasant enough. Spacious suites complete with kitchens. They are designed for short-term visits, but the general appointments are better than a lot of apartments I have lived in.

For some reason, I was booked into a suite retrofitted for a handicapped occupant. I didn't request it, but my birth date and gender may have triggered an algorithm. I may have crossed over to a new cultural stereotype.

The only real evidence that it is a handicapped room is the shower. If my entrepreneurial spirit would get up from the couch, I could wash mini-vans in it.

Since I don't have a mini-van, I used it only to wash myself. And that is when I discovered one of the frustrating engineering problems that often pop up in hotel showers.

The hotel provided a small bottle of soap and a textured bar of soap. Both were easy to use. The top of the shampoo bottle came off easily -- even with soapy fingers. Then the problem arose -- where can I put the shampoo bottle and the soap while I finish my ablutions?

Someone had thought of that, as well. The hotel had installed a nifty triangular holder made of metal. So, in went the soap and the shampoo bottle. And just as quickly, they were bouncing off of my feet.

I picked them up and tried to put them in the holder again. Same result.

The problem was obvious, the gap in the front of the holder is just large enough to let anything smaller than a handgun to fall right through. And because it is installed on a slight grade, the soap and shampoo were wooed away by the siren call of gravity.

But the solution was at hand. Or afoot.

It is a shower for the handicapped. So, it comes outfitted with a bench. For my four days here, I repurposed the bench as a toiletry holder.

Maybe the answer to my question is that the people who design hotel rooms do talk to one another. And their answer for the useless toiletry holder was to make the bench so obvious that even a writer could figure it out.

And who says traveling is not broadening?