Dumb and Dumber on Holiday

Mr T and I had a couple of “moments” during our last weekend in Traralgon. We stayed in a lovely spacious apartment that included a deep spa bath, a remote-controlled heating and cooling system in the lounge area, and a walk-in wardrobe in the main bedroom.

After sussing out each room and cupboard in the apartment we unpacked and Mr T hung his shirts so they didn’t get creased. Unfortunately, the more Mr T tried to keep his shirts from creasing, the more his forehead creased.

I found him having a great deal of trouble as he attempted to hang his shirts' coat hangers on the door handle of the walk-in wardrobe. The door handle was too close to the doorframe, thus preventing him from getting the hangers to sit over the handle properly.

‘What are you doing?’ I asked, rather confused as to why he was persisting with the door handle when he had a whole wardrobe on the other side of the door.

As he opened the door to the wardrobe in an attempt to hang the shirts and then close the door, he remembered what was on the other side of the door. ‘I could just hang them in there, couldn’t I,’ he said rather sheepishly.

It wasn’t long until Mr T decided to check out the spa bath. After a while I too went in the direction of the kids’ bedroom and the bathroom that contained the spa bath, only to be met by a loud rumbling sound.

‘What is that horrid noise?’ I asked.

‘It’s the spa bath, don’t worry, it’ll turn itself off soon,’ replied Mr T, thinking that it worked on a timer.

After ten minutes the sound didn’t stop and I went into the bathroom to where the “empty” spa bath sat, still desperately trying to circulate air and water through an empty bath tub. I became a little worried when I noticed a slight burning smell. I looked at the button Mr T had pushed to turn it on and went back to where he was in the bedroom and asked if he had tried to turn it off by pushing the button again.

‘No,’ said Mr T slowly as he thought about the merits of my suggestion, so I returned to the bathroom and pushed the button. The spa bath stopped.

Both are understandable gaffs when one is unfamiliar with the abode or its amenities, but there is no excuse for the dumb moment we shared on the first night.

We decided to turn the heating on when it became quite chilly during the evening. The instructions above the remote control on the wall said, ‘Pick up remote, turn it on, set temperature. There will be a delay before the system starts’.  It sounds pretty simple doesn’t it, and even more so when it was the standard wall-mounted system, like the one in this picture, which you can hear and feel when it’s on and working. Not for us!

We pushed the on button and the remote beeped. We set the temp and the remote beeped each time we went up or down a degree. We sat back down in front of the television and waited for the heating system on the farthest wall to start warming the place. After twenty minutes, I increased the temperature on the remote to 29C (84F) because the room temperature hadn’t changed at all.

After discussing how useless the heating system was, we concluded it must be because it was trying to heat a very large room. After another fifteen minutes, by which time I was wearing my large overcoat over my pyjamas and had a blanket wrapped around my legs and feet, I went to the remote and picked it up and increased the temperature by another five degrees. I moved closer to the heating system and noted how quiet it was – too quiet!

With the remote still in my hand I pushed the power button on the remote again – maybe turning it off and on again would help – and instead of the remote control beeping, this time the heating system beeped as well – and a light came on! It was at that point that we realised the heating system hadn’t been on at all because we hadn’t picked the remote up and pointed it in the direction of the heating system.

We took comfort in the fact that we were as dumb as each other when it came to figuring out the heating – or lack of it.