Mike’s Room

Today, I danced with my shower.

“Interesting.” I hear you say (you, as I assume I only have one reader). “Tell me more!”

The shower and I have a symbiotic relationship of sorts. I turn the rotaty dial thingy to on, and twist it around. In return, the shower gives me water with varying degrees of temperature. It’s a good relationship, and one I have come to rely on.

Today, the shower could not be trusted.

Today I turned the shower on, did the twisting, and waited for the water to reach a comfortable temperature (probably somewhere around body temperature, but I’ve never thought to take a thermometer into the shower). At this point, I gingerly stepped into the water jets and got on with my usual washing ritual.

But not today.

You see, today the shower chose to ignore my twisting of its dial. The temperature gradually crept up, barely noticeable at first, until it reached “that point”. That point being the moment where your skin feels (for want of a better, more PC, adjective) “white”. It’s probably where “white hot” comes from - that feeling where you step into the blazing sun, or plunge into a hot tub. That point.

So I turn the dial some more (colder anticlockwise, hotter clockwise - easy to remember). The water gets hotter, and hotter, untill it’s too hot to actually stand underneath. Great. This is the moment where I have an Idea.

As well as having a dialy thing, our shower also has two buttons. “High” and “Low”. The “High” button is red, and to the right of the white “Low” button (why they didn’t choose to put the “High” button vertically above the “Low” button was probably due to some HCI mixup at the design stage). Red to me suggests several images. Heat, for one. Fire, blood, danger, caution and, at a pinch, communism. The red button was currently pressed in. So I pressed the white button.

White, as well as suggesting “white heat” (strange things adjectives) also offers the following: safety, innocence, purity. Also ice, cold, and snow. The shower chose the latter. Damn.

However, there was a moment before the water became untenably freezing in which there was a satisfying “middle ground”. Where the water wasn’t quite burning, nor making everything turn blue and smaller. This was a good time.

So, today I danced with my shower. Press the red button, duck into the shower until scalding. Press the white button, duck into the shower until shivering. Repeat until clean.

Edit: Idea now has a capital I, because it was a good idea.