The leaky hand basin

[louiselux]

Responding to feedback: a guide for the bashful fanficcer by nindulgence is funny! I usually veer between The Replies Heartfelt, Analytical and Hasty, with a smattering of Reply Ecstatic when I manage to put my hard-won dignity to one side for long enough to squee.

One thing about people who run their own businesses: a lot of them are hyperactive. The furniture man I met today was *so* excitable he had to talk non-stop and with no breaks between sentences or thoughts.

Erm, moving swiftly on, here's a bed time rant story.

Virgin trains' hand wash basins are too small, with a, mark this, rounded edge on the outer edge. The rounded edge, which might easily have been a raised lip at a negligible increase in cost, lets water run over the edge of the basin (which is too small to hold the spray from the tap above it when hands are placed under the flow). The floor gets wet and slippery. The toilet roll dispenser shreds the paper when you pull it out, so pieces of it fall into the water on the floor. The toilets are unpleasant to use because of it. It all has to be cleaned up at the end of the day, making extra work for the cleaner.

These may sound like small complaints, and in the big picture are they really important? Maybe not in themselves, but what they point to makes me depressed: a lack of genuine thought and care about our everyday surroundings, no thought of how people are going to use the objects in their world. You could argue that Virgin spends on the big things like making sure the signals work and the trains don't derail. I'm glad they do. But this small stuff is easy to get right. It's not hard to design a hand basin doesn't spill. All it needs is a 10mm lip.

I wrote to Virgin and asked them if they'd tested the hand basins in use, and if so, why had they fitted them if they allowed water to splash on the floor?

Virgin replied that they basins had been carefully chosen and thoroughly tested. Which makes me think that they either didn't test them properly, or they didn't care that they would leak. I just don't understand that lack of care. What's more, anyone who travelled on the new Virgin rolling stock in the past year has smelled the dreaded smell. That smell came from water leaking from the basins and 'reacting with the carpets' (rotting them, I infer from this). The trains stank and the carpets have all had to be replaced, probably for a high cost. Virgin says that the wash hand basins had another design fault in the connecting pipes. For a new train, supposedly heralding a great new age of rail transport, this is so shoddy it make me want to weep.

Comments

[rochefort.livejournal.com]

Hi. You don't know me from Adam (Eve?) but I saw your post on a friend's friends page and couldn't resist jumping in.

About 10 years ago when he still toured, Ben Elton did this wonderful sketch on the Ministry of Crap Design, which he said was responsible for so much of the truly awful stuff that surrounds us. The example he gave was those little metal teapots you get in cafeterias and motorway service stations: you know the ones with the metal handles, that heat up to the same boiling temperature as the water inside and then, when you try to pour your tea, dribble it all down the front of the teapot because the spout isn't really a spout, but a sort of bent-metal lip?

His point was, why have bad design when it's so easy to have good? How do we end up with such fourth-rate stuff as part of our daily lives, because it's just another thing that grinds people down in tiny ways. Is it a peculiarly British thing? I don't know, but sometimes it feels like it. Of course, taking the piss was his way of fuming about it, and really the only one I can use. Otherwise I'd spend my entire day thinking, 'What moron thought this was a good idea? Did they actually test it?... rant, ranty rant ad infinitum...', like a 30-something Victor Meldrew.

Anyway, I've gone on long enough on your journal. To cheer you up, here's a poem someone sent me a little while ago. It doesn't scan very well, but it gets its point across:

Latest from the Ministry of Crap Design
I'd Like to meet, and cheerfully throttle
The man who interfered with the design, of the humble plastic bottle.
It used to be so simple, when returning from the store.
But now I put my bags down, and they tumble on the floor.
The problem being the bottoms of the bottles now are round,
instead of being square, like the previous design, which basically was sound.
So why I ask you did he interfere?
And why attempt such revolutionary change, when clearly the worse for beer?

[louiselux.livejournal.com]

Hee! Thanks for the poem:-) It's so true. My water bottles fall over all the time. I suppose there are benefits to having round bottles, they're easier to grip, easier to mould and the don't have the weak points of corners, but then they don't stack or pack very well and they're less stable.

I don't think bad design is inherent in the British, but it's something we accept. Partly because we don't like to complain and partly, I think, because we don't know any better. For a long time we weren't taught about design in this country so I don't think there's a very great appreciation of form or fitness for purpose. Another part of the problem is that we just don't *make* things anymore, which is a chicken and egg sort of problem. What manufacturers we do have generally really don't have much of a clue about how to use design to make good products, whereas we used to lead the world in innovation and quality. Then technology advanced, other countries looked at us and thought - we can do that, and better. We got left behind and instead of competing on quality tried to compete on price. Now design is seen as just styling, and something that can be discarded when the recession hits. Sad, but true. Of course, this is very general. We do have some wonderful companies and brilliant designers, but it's just not part of our broader manufacturing culture anymore.

Right, er, I'll stop ranting now, but it's nice to hear someone else gets upset about this sort of thing, not just me.

[rochefort.livejournal.com]

I agree with just about everything you've said here. When I think of the amazing engineers and designers of the 19th and early 20th centuries, I wonder what happened to make that talent all dry up.

I think you're right about its being partly due to cheapskate attitudes. The purchasers of bad design are really the ones responsible for its perpetuation: if Virgin Trains and motorway services didn't buy these crap products, the companies who made them would go out of business. But then, the products are cheap and mostly, you have to pay for good design. Europeans understand this because they live with good design; we don't.

And we do still produce good designers: Jonathan Ive, Apple's head of design, is a Brit. Then again, he's had to go to America. And there's also that whole thing about Brits being uncomfortable with change and innovation and success.

You're right about Brits not complaining, too; but then again, the message is always 'You can complain all you like, but it won't change anything'. It comes from everyone, and pervades all areas of life – from the person who files your letter of complaint in the bin, to the Prime Minister who takes responsibility for absolutely nothing. So for the sake of sanity we all either turn into Victor Meldrew or adopt an 'Oh, we'll just make do' attitude.

Still, mustn't grumble.

[louiselux.livejournal.com]

I wonder what happened to make that talent all dry up.

It's hard to say when the rot set in. There must be many factors contributing to it: Empire and British complacency- the feeling that we'd always be on top; the snobbery directed at the people who'd made it rich with 'new money' (of course, now they're our old money) leading to the idea that trade was a low and common activity. The loss of a generation of new ideas and talent in WW1.

And you're completely right about bad design being perpetuated by big companies, and that ties in with that musn't grumble attitude we're shackled with. It's so true that the overall attitude is 'don't bother complaining because it won't help'. The sad thing is it's a self-fulfilling prophecy.

[biascut.livejournal.com]

And worse, even though you know rationally that the water on the floor is probably from the basin, you can never shake the thought that it's someone else's wee! Or is that just me?

The thing that I could never understand about the old Virgin trains was that they only had a handle on the outside of the door, so you had to open the window to let yourself out. I've been offered many possible explanations for this, such as it's so you can't open the door when the train is moving. But the doors lock automatically when the train is in motion anyway, and only open at the platform. How fricking hard can it be to put a handle on the inside of a door?!

[louiselux.livejournal.com]

Yes, that's a good point. I always think it's wee, even when I know it isn't. Sometimes soap drips out of the dispenser, leaving a yellow pool on the sink, and that looks even more like wee.

I'm not sure about the door handles. I think it's one of those vestigial things that got carried over from the older trains. I assume that older ones didn't have automatic locks, so having the door handle on the outside was a basic safety precaution. When the new trains were made, they must've considered it to be a failsafe which would prevent people opening the doors if the automatic lock stopped working. Not much of a failsafe though, if you can open the window and just turn the handle.