C.R.A.P.

Undesirable placement of telephone and toilet

I'm now safely back home after my jaunt to the Far East and recovering from 18 hours of being cooped up in a metal tube and forced to consume some kind of substance purporting to be food. But fortunately I avoided the gastrointestinal difficulties that have in the past made traveling in far off lands a miserable experience. Indeed following a trip to New Delhi a few years ago, I remember praying for death for several days after making innumerable trips, mostly on my hands and knees, to the bathroom. But that's a story for another day. However I do wish to comment on the growing, and to the mind of this old microbiologist, the quite rebarbative trend in so-called luxury hotels of placing extra telephones adjacent to toilets. The last thing I want to do when I'm, err, doing my ablutions, is to receive incoming phone calls. And if I make a call to someone I certainly don't want to talk to them while they are otherwise engaged. Most of all it has to by unhygienic as by definition the user cannot have washed their hands. It's beyond the pale. I'm going to start a movement (pun intended) which I'm going to call the Campaign for the Removal of Ancillary Phones (CRAP).

While we're on the subject Chertz makes a related observation.