The leaky hand basin
Feb. 26th, 2004 11:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
louiseluxResponding to feedback: a guide for the bashful fanficcer by ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
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 timerant 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.
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
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.
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no subject
Date: 2004-02-27 03:17 pm (UTC)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.