ladyofastolat | Today's grr-some things

1. Non-fiction books with no page numbers. Children's non-fiction books always have a contents page and an index, even when the book is aimed at 5 year olds and has only a few sentences a page. This is so children can learn how to use such things, and is all well and good. However, today I was faced with a request from a teacher who had decided to do a topic that isn't on the curriculum, but still expected a box full of books on it. (This is yet another grr-some thing.) Since it wasn't on the curriculum, there were precisely NO children's books on it, but I thought there was a possibility that I might get odd paragraphs here and there in books on broader topics. This required searching in about a hundred books. The topic in question was indeed mentioned in the index of a few of them, but in several cases, there book didn't actually contain page numbers. Or, rather, the number for page 1 appeared at the top left, the number pages 2, 3, 4 and 5 were missing, 6 had its number lurking at the bottom right, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 were missing... and so on. Very, very annoying.

2. Blurbs that ruin the entire plot. I also had to search for children's novels about a particular topic, and I found a likely-looking candidate. However, the blurb was a complete summary of the entire book, even including words along the lines of "until it reaches an exciting conclusion, in which..." This happens far too often. I've read several books in which the shock revelation that happened on page 500 had been totally ruined by the blurb. Why do they do it? I know that writing blurbs is hard; it's something I always find very difficult when posting my own fanfic. You don't want to spoil major plot twists, but neither do you want to say so little that the reader has no idea what the book is about. But, still, summarising the entire book, even including the final chapter. Why?

3. Public toilets with automatic hand-washing units. I went to some public toilets today that had 6 cubicles, but only two hand-washing units. When you put your hands in, you got blasted with a ridiculous amount of soap - soap that made my hands itch for hours afterwards. Then you get what felt like a bath-load of warm water, and many seconds later, you got a very long blast of hot air. The whole cycle lasted a lot longer than the average toilet visit, so the result was a long queue for hand-washing, even though there was no queue for the toilets. The person in front of me walked off without drying their hands, but I still had to stand there for what felt like a good minute while it finished its cycle, before I could start washing my hands. Grr!