By Josh Gondelman — 30 Mar 2026

#177. Hotel Showers and You

Would you believe this is the shower head from my current hotel room?

Hi everyone,

I am writing to you once again from sunny Los Angeles, California, where I'll be staying for another week. Living in a hotel for this long makes me feel a little like Royal Tenenbaum, partly fancy and partly isolated. I've been away long enough that Maris and I have agreed to catch up on our usual shows separately. I think today's episode of Paradise is the season finale, and I cannot wait to see how these storylines resolve or linger into Season 3. I'm also really enjoying DTF St. Louis. Last week's episode took an abrupt and unexplained digression into a Lonely Island style music video, and I was like...hell yeah let's DO this. (I haven't seen the new episode yet.)

In my two weeks (and counting) here, I've gotten to see many (but not all) of my Los Angeles-based friends. I went to some classic LA restaurants for the first time and bought dinner for a couple of excellent pals. I met a very cool baby and watched some college basketball with my old roommates from when I first moved to New York. They live here now. I didn't go back to New York for one night to watch college basketball. My friend Sean's fridge was stocked with seasonal Sam Adams beers, which allowed me to do one of my favorite things: Talking about Massachusetts while visiting California.

I've also found some gentle rhythms for hotel living. Every morning I walk around the corner to the little Italian cafe that (in true European fashion) opens at least thirty minutes after its advertised business hours begin. On Thursday morning, I popped into Da Carla at about 8:50am. Da titular Carla was nowhere to be seen for several minutes. She emerged, took my order, and disappeared for several more minutes. Then she came back, took another customer's order, served him, and started getting my coffee together. As she handed me my iced americano and croissant she leaned over the counter.

"I like your style," she said. "Not in too much of a hurry." I appreciated her conspiratorial vibe, even though it was mostly the pace at which she worked that caused the leisurely start to my day. On principle, I try to respect people's rights to do an inefficient job at work, and I was glad she appreciated my attitude. She also tried not to let me tip (another European touch) but I put a dollar in the tip vase anyway. Very little brings me joy like the opportunity to charm an eccentric old lady, so this was a pretty great morning.

I did, however, notice myself quietly singing Warren Zevon lyrics to myself while I walked down the hotel hallway over the weekend. And I've also started describing my state of mind as "my Barton Fink era...if Barton Fink worked on spec." So mentally maybe I am ready to go home soon.

In other news: Last week I was on Vanessa Bayer and Jonah Bayer's podcast How Did We Get Weird?, and I had a ton of fun talking (once again) about Sideways Stories From Wayside School, which Jonah and Vanessa had not heard of before I proposed it as a topic!!! They were SO nice and funny, and it felt great to talk to them for an hour about weird little childhood/hometown traditions and habits.

And please don't forget that next week I'll be telling jokes near Cincinnati (4/10-4/11) and in Washington DC (4/12)!!! I know the DC Improv show is more than halfway sold, so grab those tickets if you're thinking about it.

PEP TALK FOR HOTEL SHOWERS

A hotel shower is almost always wrong. The water pressure is often too gentle, a dribble when you want a torrent. Occasionally – very occasionally – it's too strong, an unceasing geyser in place of a firm rush. The shower head itself is too low to maneuver under or too high to comfortably fiddle with. All too frequently, the floor of the shower is slippery to a borderline lethal extent, as if you were washing yourself with olive oil instead of water. The shampoo smells like it's designed for a child or an industrial kitchen or a dog.

And let's not even get started on the situation at Airbnbs. Some of the scenarios I've encountered would make you forsake hygiene entirely rather than engage with them. A claw foot tub with sides so high you'd need an escalator to comfortably make your way over the top. Systems of dials and switches that seem more suited to operating a time machine than a faucet. Water temperature that bears no relationship to position of the knob that allegedly indicates warming or cooling. It's a mess. I don't know how anyone lives like that in the long term. Or maybe the owners of these buildings decided to start renting them out because they realized the showers alone rendered them uninhabitable in a full time way.

My great hotel shower experiences are as memorable to me as the best meals I've eaten. The vastness and fluffiness of the towels at the Intercontinental Hotel by the Minneapolis airport, for example, are as easy for me to recall as the taste and texture of my grandmother's twice baked potatoes. But far more often, the whole experience feels dislocated, out of sync.

Of course, a shower feeling wrong to you does not mean it's wrong for everyone. I understand that while some may share my preference for a level of water pressure that feels like losing a paintball match, others may prefer a softer aquatic touch. I know my taste is not universal. Neither are anyone else's shower proclivities.

It is helpful to keep in mind that a hotel shower doesn't feel right to you because it's not your shower. You are away from home standing under a spigot that belongs to everyone and no one. The sensitivity and variability of every room's plumbing cannot be calibrated to your specific needs. Sometimes it's a match, and sometimes it isn't. You get what you get, and you don't get upset. (Sorry, I slipped into an old bit of wisdom from my days as a preschool teacher.)

No amenity is perfect for everyone. Even the softest, most feathery bedding might cause someone with an allergy or perhaps a more spartan taste to toss and turn for hours, arriving at their cousin's wedding red-eyed and irritable through no fault of anyone's. Meanwhile a relentless, aggressive heating system might be exactly what some travelers need to feel cozy after coming in from the cold, but it would leave me sweaty and miserable. I will deign to presume that nobody likes the flashing light that half of hotel rooms seem to have on the ceiling for some reason. And if you (as hotel management) do not reset the alarm clock that allowed the last visitor to rise and shine for a 5am flight before the next person checks in, the owner of the building should have to eat that clock piece by piece.

Just like most breakups don't occur because one person is BAD while the other is GOOD, most misfit showers result from an unfit marriage of flesh and faucet. And what reminds me that I'm far from home, wrapped in cloth that has swaddled hundreds of strangers' butts before mine, probably makes someone else feel comforted along their personal journey. What I'm saying, hotel showers, is that it's not you...it's me.

PEP TALK FOR A READER

I am running this request basically unedited, but I did add the nickname.

I was just on the phone with Walgreens for nearly 30 minutes and never managed to speak to a pharmacist. Can you please give me some advice or encouragement? Thanks!
- First, Do No Pharm

There's an old maxim that nobody on their death bed regrets not working more. I think that's probably true, right? In your waning moments, you rarely rue the times you took off from the office early to enjoy a baseball game or dinner with loved ones. I believe that if I end up on a death bed rather than dying instantly from a climate crisis induced freak weather event or a truck that smushes me into a pancake because I'm texting in a crosswalk, I will feel absolutely furious about all the time I spent on hold with businesses.

While bad customer service in a restaurant or retail setting can be a hassle, inattentive responses from an airline, a tax preparer, or even worse, a medical professional has the power to throw your day – and potentially your life – into chaos. I'm not talking about a person who is doing their best and needs a little extra time and grace to get things right. I mean the feeling of being plunged into an endless purgatory by an institution that truly doesn't care if you live or die or make it to Cleveland for your work trip at all. It's not torture, but if real torture didn't exist, this experience would be the closest thing we have. You know what I mean?

I will try anything to shorten my time on the line with a business. Googling the keypad path through their labyrinthine voicemail system. Screaming "REPRESENTATIVE!!!" into my receiver as my cries are ignored by unfeeling robot agents. Fully giving up and eating shit on whatever cost I'm trying to recoup. Nothing works every time. Some tactics don't seem to work ever, but I don't abandon them because I'm not a quitter and I am ridiculous and spiteful.

I don't have any advice for you other than blasting the hold music on speakerphone and continuing with the rest of your day, prepared to drop everything when you hear a human voice chime in on the other end of the line. I do have a little encouragement to offer, which is this: Just as an endless stream of muzak when all you want is a moment of aid holds the power to ruin your day, a small kindness can turn someone's whole situation around. Whether you work in the customer service industry or not, you have the chance – several chances, I bet – to help someone grab a box of cereal off a shelf too high for them to reach, or let them cut you in line for the bathroom when they look like they're about to burst, or aid them as they navigate a stroller down the stairs to the subway.

This kind of thing is specifically what AI is not capable of...a human touch, a moment of sincere kindness. I know this seems slightly unrelated, but it's not, or at least to me it's not. The same companies foisting generative artificial intelligence on us are the ones who have already made it impossible to seek relief from a person in a time of business need. While a machine can be the solution to our problems some of the time, that's only true when the owners of those computers wants to make our lives (and not only their own lives) better.

More often, issues get resolved person-to-person. And in a world that more and more frequently keeps people apart from one another, creating those connections is more valuable and more generous than ever. This might not help you get through to Walgreens (I'm not sure anything can do that) but your interminable situation is a reminder of how to live when you finally get to hang up.

PICK-ME-UP SONG OF THE WEEK:
Grace Ives - "Trouble"

Here's another rec I got from both my friend Grace Robins-Somerville and the blog Hearing Things which to me is a Siskel and Ebert "two thumbs up" but for music. Grace Ives seems very cool and innovative, which is sometimes maybe more than I need in a new artist, but this whole album (Girlfriend) grooves and pops in a way that is easy to get into. The songs veer from Young Lana Del Rey to Lady Beck to Carly Rae Jepsen Who Is Also a Little Bit Bjork. That is to say, it's exciting and unique while remaining accessible and pleasurable.

"Trouble" reminds me of something I can't quite put my finger on, or maybe it doesn't, and I like it the same amount as other things I like a lot. The bouncy, driving piano melody keeps the whole thing going for me. It's sexy and emotionally charged, but it also conveys the fun of probing how much is too much and where the intersection of good news and bad news sits. Huge recommendation from me, as you know if I have texted you about it already. (True for some but not all readers of this newsletter.)