The Drip Proof Shower Door

Drip.

Drip.

Drip.

When my stepmom was in the hospital battling cancer, I took a shower at the hospital after one of her surgeries. When I got out of the shower door and dripped all over the floor, all I could think was that I was going to kill the poor guy coughing in the next room who shared the bathroom. I imagined it over and over again while I tore off large pieces of that brown bathroom paper towel that is not quite as absorbent as normal paper towel to mop up the water. Needless to say, momma didn’t raise no killer.

We have this ability to ignore things like this because there are all these simple problems in life that are quick to get used to. We buy our rugs or towels and throw them on the floor often never realizing we are putting a band-aid on the problems. Sometimes the band-aid is cheaper and/or quicker than actually fixing the actual problem. Sometimes there isn’t a lot of thought to it. We just take it for granted that the technology of showering isn’t going to get any better. Meanwhile shower doors drip all over the floor and as for shower curtains, I take comfort that there nobody logs my shower curtain user errors. Let’s just say I’ve mopped more than a few large puddles off the ground. And meanwhile our eyes glaze over. Because it’s just the way things are.

And I’m not immune. I’ve done it a million times and will do it a million more. As a software quality engineer, I step away on vacation and wake up in the middle of the night to write down twenty issues for the software developers to look at. Sometimes all the issues come together at once. Especially with usability issues where there are certain things we take for granted that one day we realize shouldn’t be taken for granted. And with software it it is easy, because I can get someone to fix the problem for me. Or I can just go in the code and fix it myself if it comes to that. But it is harder when it is not software or with products I don’t have any control over.

In the case of shower doors, I don’t have any control over them. But we can do better than this and particularly in hospitals where lives are at stake. In this day and age,  there is no reason we can’t design a cheap drip proof shower door. And so I am putting this challenge out there. Design an affordable shower door that doesn’t drip onto the floor outside the shower. Make millions of dollars upgrading hospitals. Then give me a fraction of that because you love me.

Drip.

Drip.

Drip.

I am waiting.