It’s the Little Things
Welcome to my random musings about the world, on a weekly-to-occasional basis.
Where we are: Back in Bangkok, for a bunch of appointments. Dentist! Hair cut!
It’s the little things
I don’t know anything about engineering, but I can usually tell when there isn’t any. We’ve spent the last month in a brand new hotel—we checked in ten days after it opened. From the very first day, our shower was incredibly slow to drain. As soon as you turn the water on, it’s an inch deep. Nothing is clogged. If you sort of sweep the water over to the drain, it goes right down.
I never realized that a shower floor should be very slightly canted—almost imperceptibly—until the first time I encountered one that isn’t. It’s surprisingly common.
The same is true of roads. There are engineering tricks that allow water to run off into the gutters, so that the roads don’t always flood as soon as it starts to rain. Those tricks are really useful. And yet, they’re not ubiquitous.
Once, on a brand new road, we noticed all the cars (including the one we were in) slowing to a near-stop to go around a curve—it was completely flat. Apparently banking the road a tiny bit, almost imperceptibly, stops the cars from slipping off the road entirely.
The best (worst?) ever was the staircase in an airport.
The front desk staff at our hotel in Yangon told us it might take up to an hour to get to the airport for our flight to Bagan. So we left an hour early. It took 20 minutes.
When we arrived, we couldn’t find the check-in counter for our airline. After several minutes of studying the options, we finally went to the nearest counter and showed the agent our tickets.
She went and got another agent. They studied our tickets. “Don’t know,” they said.
“Where?” we asked, gesturing around the room.
“No have,” they said.
It slowly dawned us that our airline didn’t exist. Perhaps it had at one time? Perhaps it would some day in the future? We never understood what had happened, but those nice agents said it was no problem, there was room on one of their flights, leaving an hour or so after the one we thought we had booked. They simply issued us new tickets, and we were good to go. It was all sort of surreal.
So we had time to spare. We went to the gate, where the air-conditioning was set to arctic. To stay warm, I kept wandering around, looking for entertainment, going up and down the stairs that led from the gates to the upper mezzanine where the snack bar and duty-free were.
I kept tripping on one particular step. Then Lee went up, to buy a drink, and he tripped. On the same step. Eventually, we both stood there, studying the stairs, and realized the one in the middle had a slightly different riser height. It was as if one person started building from the bottom, and one from the top, and when they met in the middle, all the minor mismeasurements added up to an extra inch or so.
Call me fussy, but I’d prefer if the people building THE AIRPORT measured a little more carefully.
Engineering, it turns out, is one of those things that we rely on every day, but rarely appreciate. I would like to take this moment to publicly thank the person who figured out how to make showers drain. Next time I encounter one that works, I will remember to be grateful.
From my writer’s notebook:
About a year ago, a very special book appeared at an auction house in Brooklyn. It was a register of burials in a Jewish cemetery in Cluj, Romania, a community that was virtually wiped out by the Holocaust.
The book was quickly withdrawn from the sale when its importance was pointed out by the World Jewish Restitution Organization. It contains genealogical information that could help the Jewish community of Cluj reconstruct their history, including the ancestry of people who were deported and murdered by the Nazis.
When we talk about the destruction of cultural artifacts, this is what we mean: the kind of quotidian documents and records that enable us to understand and preserve our human history.
Take care,
Lisa
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