Experience over youth, every time

A standard lamp in a hotel bathroom. Bear with me.

On a recent trip to Vienna, we checked into the pleasant Indigo Hotel in the lively Naschmarkt district. Indigo is one of those hotels where the front door opens directly into a welcoming bar, a comfortable seating area of colourful armchairs and sofas, and a coworking space -- somewhere to plug in the laptop without the existential gloom of working from a hotel bedroom.

Considerable thought had evidently gone into the layout and design of the ground floor, which one would hope might carry on upstairs. And indeed, our room was pleasantly designed and immaculately presented. It was pristine and comfortable. Would we happily stay again? Not a chance.

There were niggles. A fridge that didn't chill (described as a "design feature"), no Netflix on the TV, and a shower that flooded the entire bathroom floor regardless of how creatively one angled the head. Irritating, certainly, but not necessarily fatal.

The dealbreaker was the lighting. Or rather, the configuration of the lighting. A myriad of switches were arranged like a challenge on the ITV gameshow ‘The Krypton Factor’ (ask a boomer near you). After three days of methodically working through every permutation as though trying to crack the Enigma code, the conclusion was unavoidable: there was no way to operate the bathroom light independently. Despite three switches positioned optimistically beside the bathroom door. All were overridden by a bedside master switch that held the entire room's illumination hostage, meaning that at 3am, you could not turn the bathroom light on. At all. Perhaps this was just as well, as it was bright enough to illuminate the Allianz Arena.

Any seasoned traveller will recognise this particular torment: the hotel room lighting puzzle, somewhere between an abstract art installation and psychological warfare. This raises the question: who designs these configurations? What is the logic? Is there a logic?

The only plausible explanation involves age and experience, or, specifically, the lack of both. This designer is evidently still young enough to sleep through the night without interruption and hasn't yet accumulated enough hotel stays to appreciate that guests at 3am are not in the mood for a treasure hunt. They want a light switch. A simple solitary switch. That does the light.

The solution, arrived at by someone with rather more mileage on the clock, was to unplug the standard lamp from the bedroom and relocate it to the bathroom. Inelegant? Sure. Effective? Absolutely

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This, dear reader, is why you hire for experience.