Friday, September 5, 2014

Things that piss me off: Ice bucket condoms that are too small


I love ice.  No soft drink, no glass of water, is complete without it.  So, when I settle into a hotel room, and each night when I return to one, I fill its ice bucket.  Inevitably, that bucket is a piece of plastic crap that the hotel never cleans, so for your own health you must first line it with plastic before filling it with ice.  The hotel kindly provides a plastic bag insert--an ice bucket condom--that you can use for this purpose.

If only the bloody things weren't always too small.

The bag is never quite big enough to both line the sides and bottom and also wrap over the lip of the ice bucket.  So, you stretch and pull and finally get it to kinda sorta fit--until the first ice cubes drop from the ice machine.  Then, either the edges of the bag fall into the ice, or you discover the bucket can now hold only a fraction of the ice it should be able to handle, thanks to air trapped around the bag.

This frustration is completely unnecessary.  Surely someone could make a healthy profit providing bags that actually fit these buckets. 

Alternatively, hotels could stock more ice buckets, ideally insulated metal ones, and actually provide clean ones each day--as many European hotels do.

No, of course they won't.  The firms that manage the hotels would rather torture us, presumably in the cause of a tiny bit more profit, with ill-fitting ice bucket condoms. 

That pisses me off.




6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Might I suggest that you carry a gallon sized freezer bag with you. They are a good fit, sturdier than those flimsy condoms and extra storage for all those little soaps, lotions, etc.

Michelle said...

It could be so much worse. At least it is a clean ice bucket condom.

Anonymous said...

Sadly, even if someone came up w/ a better one that was only a penny more or even a fraction of a cent more, not sure that the hotel chains would spend that amount x however many they would buy over a year in additional cost. A line from the movie "Network" comes to mind.

Mark said...

Not a bad idea. I might well try that.

Mark said...

Okay, the "Not a bad idea" comment of mine was a response to the Anonymous comment, not Michelle's comment.

I didn't want anyone thinking I might leave behind a soiled ice bucket condom.

Michelle is right that it could be worse.

Mark said...

Regarding the comment about cost, you could very well be right. I like to think some hotels would spend for higher quality, but the number is likely to be quite small.

Labels

Blog Archive