Well-Conditioned

I have this theory about hotel air-conditioners.

One can't hep these things, really. When one travels way too much. Like I do. Don't know if I've mentioned it, in the last three to five blogs or so.

Anyway, the state of the modern hotel room is this: you must run AC. Most of the windows are sealed shut, if they ever opened at all. And if you do open them, it's usually too loud from all the 1) airplanes, 2) people screwing around in the parking lot, 3) traffic, 4) air conditioners.

No, really.

The roar of air conditioners outside the hotel forces one to close the window and...run the air conditioner.

However: Not all thermostates are alike. This is my theory, earth-shattering though it may not be.

This morning I had a conversation with a guy in the fitness room. Which is a hotel euphemism for "really small extra room into which we've jammed random pieces of exercise equipment." We talked aobut how all treadmill s are not alike. That 4 mph is clearly not 4 mph for all treadmills.

This may seem like a minor, even obsessively nitpicky, point.

But you get accustomed to running at a particular speed. And the fact that the exercise machine has a digital readout implies a certain level of scientific accuracy. As if, in our common physical universe, 4 mph might be the same in a hotel in Georgia as it is in a hotel in California. Which is demonstrably not true.

And so it is with the thermostat.

One would think one could find a particular temperature, say 68, that might be one's ideal room temperature. But 68 in one hotel in another's 64 is another's 74. Perhaps, I'm meant to think it's just me, but three hotels in five nights provides pretty clear empirical evidence.

I suspect it has to do with the individual hotel's AC system. And the motion-sensor deals kind of stop the thing running at night. Either that, or they tone down the AC at night, to save on money, you know.

Just goes to show, there's no such thing as a sure thing.

Either that or hotel physics are as questionable as restaurant physics.

Entirely possible.