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

[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.