More Vegas Observations

A few other random observations from my Vegas trip last week:

The Aria is the only place I’ve visited in years where the Close Door button in the elevators actually closed the door. In most elevators, that button is as effective as the button on the sidewalk at an intersection that’s supposed to change the light to get traffic to stop so you can cross. We all know those buttons aren’t hooked up to anything. Pressing them is as futile as trying to get through to a human at AT&T Customer Support. But at Aria, you select your floor, then push the Close Door button, and it actually works.

The soap, shampoo, conditioner, and body wash all said they had a “Citrus and Green Tea” scent. I don’t know who wants to smell like tea, but I do know that “citrus” isn’t a scent. It’s a category that includes, oranges, lemons, lime, tangerines, grapefruits, etc. Telling me something has a “citrus” scent is no different than telling me it has a “dairy” scent, leaving me wondering whether I’m going to smell like skim milk, Greek yogurt, or limburger cheese.

There are no swimming pools at The Aria. Instead, they have three “lounging” pools. That means there’s no deep end and nowhere to swim laps. I discovered this when, after laying on a chaise longue for a while, I went for a dip and saw lots of people with just their heads sticking out of the water. But when I waded in, at no point in the pool did the water come over my swimsuit. Now, I’m 6’4”, so the deepest part of the pool couldn’t have been more than three-and-a-half feet, which meant that everyone in the pool was either a Munchkin or on their knees. It was the latter. People went into the pool to cool off, but only from the neck down. How odd.

Why don’t hotel rooms use fitted sheets? At my height, my feet need to hang over the edge of the bed, but when the top sheet is tucked in, I won’t fit. So I always un-tuck that sheet, only to discover that the bottom sheet doesn’t cover the end of the mattress – so my feet are going to touch bare mattress, which is not a pleasant thought in a hotel room. If the hotel used fitted sheets, I wouldn’t have this problem, and all I’d have to worry about is what sort of germs and bodily fluids were left behind on the bedspread by the previous guest – the ones that will only show up under a blacklight when the local TV station shows up to investigate How Your Hotel Bed Can Kill You. That’s also why the bedspread and the extraneous other stuff (what is that long piece of fabric doing down at the foot of the bed?) get tossed on the floor in the corner of the room as soon as I get there. It seems like fitted sheets would also save time for the housekeepers, as pulling the sheet over the corners has got to be easier than short-sheeting and tucking.

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