Selective Amnesia

Designing efficient water channelling systems

It’s been a fortnight of pleasure, and mild discomfort, in Dubai. The pleasure flows from being able to command running water at a mere lift of a lever, instead of wrenching with multiple valves and gears.

Taps in Dubai (at least the ones I’ve seen so far) work on the simple premise that man is stupid, (happy now, dear feminists?) more so when he is in a hurry. And so, the powers that be (His Highness Shaikh Mohammad Bin Rashid Al Maktoum and his cabinet and their team) designed taps that work with a simple lever – up for water; down for close.

This is THE WAY, in pretty much every loo, every ‘hand wash’ in every restaurant (with the sole exception to the rule being Home Foods restaurant in Karama)

Further pleasure – bathtubs. Unlike the infidels, the bathtubs, the taps rather, don’t have to be a puzzle. There’s no determining left, right, the angle and degree of turn, the discrete or continuous nature of the water flow.

A small, simple, handy little button decides where water flows. Pushed down, water flows to the tub. Pulled up, it goes to the shower. (Admittedly, my sample size in this bathtub research is small – 2 to wit. I can’t really storm into arbit citizen’s house asking to see the bathroom. I am sure it violates condition 4 of my visa)

Anyway, as I was saying, the taps are simple, and channelling the flow is as simple as, well, pushing a button is.

The problem is, (and this is where the mild discomfort rears its ugly head) the temperature of the water. No matter what way you turn the little blue/red knob, the water comes out at a certain degree. The degree the rest of the world calls boiling hot. Apparently, this is so because the water supply comes from below the ground. And the ground is almost always under 40 degree sunlight. Which means, regardless of my intentions, and irrespective of the thermostat, my bathtub is a sauna.

Oh, well! They do say hot water invigorates the senses.

Dubai