Grrs

[ladyofastolat]

We're planning to go to Portsmouth for a couple of nights next weekend (Sunday and Monday, since I'm working on Saturday), since when we stayed there for my birthday, Pellinor couldn't get the day off work so I had to explore it by myself, and the whole thing was rather overshadowed by the fact that I was worried about Precious. We must have spent about 3 hours to date on dithering over hotels. The presence of a couch in the room adds significantly to my enjoyment of a hotel stay, since it allows me to get up and go and read while Pellinor's still asleep in the morning, and also gives us somewhere comfortable to sit and chat. However, the presence of a couch seems to be something that very few hotels bother to list. Small hotels where every room is different sometimes provide photographs of all their rooms, so you can do search and locate operations in order to snare your couch, but very very few of them seem to think that this is something that anyone would be interested in knowing about. Surely I can't be the only person who considers the presence of a comfy chair to be an important feature in a hotel room.

A similar thing happened when I was trying to find a self-catering cottage in the Scottish borders a few years ago. The number one feature we were looking for was for the cottage to be within walking distance of a pub that served food, so we didn't have to cook every night. Walking distance of a small supermarket/corner shop was also a plus. Most cottages bombarded us with information about their facilities, but very few bothered to mention proximity to pubs and shops. I can understand why those out in the wilds would be cagey about it ("Whatevertown and its restaurants are a few minutes away," said those cottages that were in the middle of nowhere ten miles from civilisation) but even those that were a few hundred yards from a good eaty pub often failed to mention the fact.

In other Grrs, Pellinor solved my "My new MP3 player isn't working!" grr... by peeling off the protective film that covered the screen. Rather than making the film transparent, like any sensible person would do, they'd covered the screen with black film with green icons on, exactly copying what the screen would look like if unresponsive and with a low battery. As a result, I'd spent ages prodding buttons, going "It doesn't work! No matter what I do, it just displays this picture of headphones! And look! I've charged the thing for 6 hours, and the battery's still half dead!" Why on earth would anyone think this is a good idea? (Or was I just being spectacularly stupid?)

Comments

[adaese.livejournal.com]

I've been looking at websites that sell bathroom cabinets, thinking it would be handy to have somewhere proper to store medicines. Do any of them distinguish between ornamental cabinets suitable for toothbrushes and lockable, child-proof ones suitable for deadly poisons? Do they give any indication whatsoever? No.

[bunn.livejournal.com]

I think that a bathroom cabinet for medicines is termed a 'lockable medicine cabinet' - there seem to be a fair number of results for that.

It's an interesting mind game to take a product list and try to come up with likely terms that people might try to use to seach for it - and then working that phrasing into the product description in such a way that Google will register it.

Businessmen that have spent 20 years selling 'medicine cabinets' in a different category to 'bathroom cabinets' or similar, are often very bad at it.

If you tell whoever you eventually choose to buy from that you had this problem, they might fix it.

[ladyofastolat.livejournal.com]

So last week you learnt how to use knives, and now you're shopping for a cabinet for your deadly poisons. And still you deny that you're training up to be a ninja. ;-)

I like the idea of an ornamental cabinet for toothbrushes, which I imagine being proudly displayed, like silver cups. :-)

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

That is rather perverse about the screen. In the same spirit, perhaps car showrooms should put a protective strip across the inside of windscreens showing what the view would be like if you were just about to run over a lollipop lady?