An Introduction to Sign Spotting

When I travel, things change quite rapidly: time zone, climate and even culture. Considering that things change so often in my life, I look for simple things that I can find wherever my travels take me. One of my favorites is visiting grocery stores, but I also like to play a game known as Sign Spotting.

The basic point of Sign Spotting is to keep an eye out for interesting signs. It sounds riveting, I know, but bear with me. You look for signs that make you smile, laugh out loud or scratch your head and think, "What the heck did they mean by that?".

Truly dedicated Sign Spotters take pictures and post them on websites such as www.signspotting.com. There have even been several books published filled with interesting signs.

Personally, I enjoy the slight distraction of Sign Spotting as well as the amusement that I feel whenever I find an interesting new sign. Some signs, like the one pictured at the beginning of this post, have interesting stories that accompany them.

When I saw the sign embedded in the ground that proudly proclaimed "THE SPACE WITHIN THESE LINES IS NOT DEDICATED," I laughed to myself and took a picture. After that, I began to think about it and decided that there must be a story behind it, so I was determined to find out what why it was placed.

One of the people with whom I was working with in Philadelphia said that he had heard that the sign had something to do with street vendors. While this was possible, I wasn't entirely convinced because the verbiage was pretty cryptic.

Some digging on the internet led me to a detailed explanation on the Philadelphia Weekly website which had a detailed explanation. It turns out that the sign means that the space is private property and therefore not dedicated to public use. The sign signifies that the owners are being nice in allowing you access to the area but that you should be respectful of their ownership.

Not all Sign Spotting is as involved as the above example so I'll give you a couple of simpler examples.
The above sign can be found in Portland, Oregon. The sign is intended to be a warning to cyclists about the trolley tracks. The thought of cyclists being hurt on their commute is not really funny, but the sign always made me smile.
The above sign was the product of vandalism at St. Mary's University in Nova Scotia, Canada. It's one of those signs that you can walk by a dozen times without registering because No Smoking signs are everywhere these days. I'm lucky that I glanced over at it because it's become one of my favorite signs.

Sign Spotting is a great travel distraction, and you can do it without any planning or special equipment. A camera helps, but it's not needed to derive pleasure from this "sport."

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The Art of Locking Yourself Out of a Hotel Room, or How Not to Impress Your In-Laws

Locks really only have one job to do: they keep people out, and they usually do it well. On a normal day, I don't have problems with locks, but on the rare occasion they cause me endless headaches.

Whenever I enter my home, I engage the deadbolt; when I travel, it's no different. As soon as I enter my room, I snap the deadbolt shut and engage the bar-style lock or security chain if one is present. This habit had served me well until I inadvertently locked my wife and myself out of our hotel room for a very embarrassing half hour. On the plus side, I did learn quite a bit about hotel room doors.

We were on a short skiing trip to Mt. Hood with my wife's parents and her sister. We were staying in a hotel, and our room had an adjoining door to my wife's family's room. After we entered our room, I flipped the bar-style lock on our main door. When we left to go out for dinner, we passed through to the adjoining room, closed the door and left for the evening. Upon returning we discovered that our room keys would no longer work. After trying several times, we headed downstairs because the door just wasn't opening.

I've before because the electronic key cards can, from time to time, become decoded and no longer work.

Upon reporting malfunction to the front desk, the attendant reprogrammed our key cards, and we returned to find that we were still unable to open the door. The slightly annoyed hotel attendant, who was really only there because of the proximity the mountain, rolled his eyes, put down his bowl of yogurt and proclaimed that the battery in the door was probably dead. I hadn't thought about the doors having batteries before, but it did make sense; all those card readers in the doors run on batteries so eventually they need to be replaced.

The attendant gathered a small case and we went up to the room. After unscrewing something on the bottom of the door handle, a small panel came loose revealing a battery and some electronics. He plugged in a small device and was able to unlock the door. Surely enough, the latch was in place and the door would only open about two inches. The attendant was unimpressed.

"Ah, well there you have it," the attendant proclaimed. "We have an opener, but it's a little tricky. We may have to wait for Phil to get back from his break." Phil was the other hotel attendant who was on duty that night.

Another trip to the front desk produced a spring steel device that looked a lot like a slim crowbar. In the right hands, this device could be used to pop open the bar-style latches. This device is handy for when guests try to exercise squatter's rights or when they just manage to lock themselves out thanks to their overzealous safety habits.

The attendant opened the door slightly using his electronic device, slipped the tool into the gap as far as it could go while still connecting with the lock, closed the door. Next he opened the door while simultaneously pushing inward with the tool. This did absolutely nothing. The idea is that the tool will be able to push the latch out of the way just before it engaged, thus allowing entry. Like most things, the use of this device is more easily described conceptually than it is to actually do; the attendant was having a hard time of it.

After 10 minutes of repeating the above process without success, Phil came by to open the door. He looked at the tool, bent it slightly, held it up to the light and smiled. Within 3 tries, he had that door open like it was nothing at all. The first attendant went back to his bowl of yogurt knowing that he should spend more time honing his skills of the hotel arts, but he was probably thinking about the slopes again before he made it to the stairs.

We thanked Phil, and we were happy to be in our room again. I learned a valuable lesson: when using adjoining rooms, always go out your own door!

Have you ever locked yourself out of your hotel room? I'd be glad to know that I'm not alone on this one.

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What's Next? Flying Luggage?

I haven't made a big secret of my dislike for marketing departments. In Shaving Soap Sheets and Holey Soap I discussed how their actions have struck me as being driven by dubious motives, and in Airport Polynom Syndrome I suggested an occasional lack of good judgment . The marketing departments in the travel industry continue to find new ways to make me scratch my head.

Lately, I've been seeing a lot of ads for a new service that is offered by FedEx through United Airlines. The service guarantees overnight, door to door baggage service. The idea of paying even more fees to have your luggage moved from one place to another strikes me as a bit silly. It's as if United is admitting that there is a good chance that your bags won't make it, so you might want to try FedEx because they really know how to move luggage. Details about this service can be found at Door-to-Door Baggage.

I may think that an airline partnering with anyone to provide a similar, competing service may be a tad self defeating, but all of that is beside my main point, which has to do with the artwork used to promote this service. I have put their image onto a white background for the sake of clarity:

I've probably spent more time than I should have in pondering the above image, but that's because it's just plain wrong. To me, it appears that the wings are going in opposite directions; that is, the leading edges of the wings are not pointing the same way. This would make forward propulsion of the suitcase quite difficult, and it would cause the suitcase to spin around like a helicopter suddenly attached to its rotor.

How successful such a flight would be would depend on a lot of factors that we just don't know, such as how much lift is provided by the wings, how much the suitcase weighs and the weight distribution of the suitcase.

Another possibility, with the wing configuration illustrated above, would be for the suitcase to be flung sideways like a boomerang. Of course, fixed wings work better for a boomerang, and these bird-like wings do not appear to be fixed.

A coworker of mine suggested that the far wing could be up so high that we are seeing the underside of it. After considering this, I determined that the only way that this theory would work would be if:
1. the suitcase were flying toward us.
or
2. the wing had become broken and twisted.

Since the suitcase appears to be of normal proportions and it would be silly to use an injured flying suitcase in an advertisement, I have dismissed this theory.

I'm pretty sure that the idea of the image is to convey that the service will give your baggage the freedom to arrive independently from you, flying to your destination like a bird. I believe that the following image invokes the appropriate connotations while avoiding some of the more tricky aeronautical quagmires that I have mentioned:
Of course, my version is not without flaws. Using my basic Photoshop skills, I copied the existing wing, which clearly shows the underside and put it on the far side of the suitcase. The far wing should picture the top side of a wing. There is also no way to tell if these wings would provide enough lift as the properties (mass, location of center of gravity, etc.) of the system are unknown.

Assuming that there was sufficient lift to get the suitcase to fly, how would it steer? I suppose that the bird-like wings could do some steering, but even birds have tail feathers. How about landings? I know that my suitcase isn't built for landing at speed on any kind of surface.

Perhaps I'm just being a little too picky, but I don't think that it's too much to ask for a little bit of reality from advertisements coming from a company with which I trust my life while flying. I mean, if they don't know how wings work, who does?

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The Dangers of Airport Polynom Syndrome

Today I’d like to explore one of the problems that is encountered by modern travelers: airports with multiple names. This may not sound like a serious problem, but airports with multiple names add to the general confusion of travel.

Airports often start off named for the city or region in which the airport is located. As the area develops, this name can become out of date, so the name is updated. Eventually, the local government decides to honor a local hero or politician by changing the airport’s name once again. The result: an airport with far too many names.

I recently took a trip to Southern California, and I was advised to fly into the Orange County airport. I looked up the airport code at World Airport Codes and found that the Orange County airport code was SNA, as the airport is also known as Santa Ana, the city in which the airport is located.

When I booked my tickets, my itinerary showed that my destination was Orange County/Santa Ana. When I checked in, my boarding pass said that my destination was Orange County. Not knowing with absolute certainty that Orange County only had one airport, I was slightly confused. After all, this was California, the same state whose public university system uses the following naming convention: University of California followed by the city name in which the university is located (ie: UC Davis, UC Berkley, etc.). There could have been Orange County/Santa Ana, Orange County/Anaheim, etc. Considering this, I think that my moderate level of confusion was completely reasonable.

After reassurances from a gate agent that I was boarding the correct plane, I relaxed for the flight down to Orange County/Santa Ana. You can understand my surprise when I was greeted by the following sign upon my arrival:

In short, I had booked a flight to Santa Ana, flown into Orange County and arrived at John Wayne. If you’ve flown to this particular airport before, then you are surely aware of this naming oddity. However, if you’ve never been there before, as in this case, then you’d probably be as confused as I was. Luckily, the family members picking me up knew about all of the names, and they picked me up at the correct airport.

The Defining of a Syndrome
Airport Polynom Syndrome:
When an airport has more than one name to which it is commonly referred to, it is said that the airport suffers from Airport Polynom Syndrome or APS.

If APS was isolated to a single airport, then I would probably let it pass, but APS does not afflict Orange County/Santa Ana/John Wayne alone. I’m not exactly sure how deep the problem is, but I do know that the effects of APS are widespread. They reach out as far as Taiwan.

When I was planning my travel to Taiwan, I was told to fly into Taipei and that I should to use the CKS airport. I typed the airport code CKS into the website of my favorite airline in order to get an idea of how long the trip Taiwan would take. Much to my surprise, I found out that this would take me to Brazil. After a bit of head scratching and a few internet searches, I discovered that CKS was an acronym for Chiang Kai Shek, for whom the airport was named. The correct code to use was TPE, for Taipei. Once I had that bit of information, my inquiries went much smoother. APS can confuse even an experienced traveler, and the effects of APS are further complicated by poorly defined acronyms.

Varying Degrees of APS
The above examples reflect the moderate variety of APS; each airport had three names. Mild cases of APS are much more common (two names), but they are dealt with much less difficulty than more advanced cases. I believe that more advanced cases of APS are present in the world today, but I don’t have any first hand knowledge of them at this time. If you know of any airports with four or more names, please let me know.

What Can We Do?
Unfortunately, I believe that the spread of APS is an inevitable part of the evolution of travel. I suppose that airlines can do a bit more to educate customers, but putting all of the names that an airport has accumulated on signage and boarding passes may be difficult due to space limitations. Airports could resist the urge to change their names, but I fear that the marketing departments of airports may be too easily swayed against common sense and usability. As consumers, we can spread the word about APS and educate ourselves about the problem in hope that those with the power to make changes take notice of the situation.

The problem would be somewhat simplified if a comprehensive list of airports with all of their aliases was available. Such a list could be integrated into an existing website such as World Airport Codes, thus providing a great service to the traveling public. Once such a list is established, you could easily do a search for any of the aliases, and the correct airport code would pop up along with all of the aliases for that airport. This wouldn’t get everyone to use the same name for an airport, but it would provide a good tool that would serve the purpose of avoiding traveler confusion.

Are you aware of any airports that suffer from advanced APS with 4 or more names? Do you have first hand experience in dealing with APS? Please add a comment below, and we’ll see how widespread this problem is.

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An Interesting Plumbing Situation

Recently, I visited the Mark Spencer Hotel in Portland, Oregon, for the weekend with my wife. After a rough night thanks to some curing carpet glue in the hallway, I was looking forward to taking a shower and getting out of the hotel for a while. I pulled away the shower curtain to discover this:

For a reason beyond my current understanding, the shower head was, as you can see, well below my eye level. To give you a bit of context, I am 5 foot 9 inches which is about average height for a man. While it wasn't the most comfortable shower I've had, I was able to get the job done.

At first I thought the low shower head could be the work of a short plumber who was exacting his revenge on everyone taller than himself. I thought about this a bit, and I figured that it wasn't a very likely scenario. Additionally, it doesn't give people that happen to be on the short side very much credit so I have rejected this theory.

I did some searching on the internet, and it looks like some handicapped-accessible rooms actually come equipped with lower shower heads for greater accessibility. This theory sounded reasonable, but there were no other accessibility considerations in the room.

A low shower head could have been deliberate in the design of the room or someone could have just run out of pipe. This is just one of the random things that I have come across in my travels. I never know when something like this is going to pop up, and they tend to amuse me to no end.

If you have any theories on the matter of lower than normal shower heads, I'd love to hear them.

Bonus Plumbing Photo:

Pictured above is a towel warmer that I came across while I was in Russia. Basically, you have a piece of pipe that hot water runs though, and you hang your towels on it. Not only does this keep your towel warm, but the whole bathroom stays nice and toasty. I quite enjoy having one of these in the bathroom as long as I remember not to touch the pipe.

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The Wonderful Things Nobody Needs

There you are, trapped at 20,000 feet with nothing to do. Your book is read and all of your batteries are dead ...what do you do? Did I mention that the inflight movie is playing, but the audio comes through the left ear in English and the right ear in Spanish? Well, it does.

What I tend to do in these situations is to raid the seat pocket for any viable form of entertainment. Aside from an airsick bag and the safety placard there is the inflight magazine, which is full of destinations that I'm not interested in, people that I've never heard of and a crossword puzzle half filled in by someone who wasn't very good at crossword puzzles.

There is the another periodical that can often be found on U.S. flights: SkyMall. If you aren't familiar with SkyMall I'll try to explain it briefly. It's a mail order catalog full of all kinds of strange things that almost no one could possibly need. Brownie pans that are all edges, pendants designed to hold the ashes of a loved one and industrially designed adult pogo sticks are just the beginning for SkyMall.

Flipping through this catalog is usually good for a few of laughs. Recently I snagged a copy off a flight, went through it and picked my top 5 items that nobody needs. Keep in mind that these are actual products, and I haven't made any of these up.

5. Flashlight Slippers
This item is actually borderline clever. A weight sensor triggers a flashlight in each slipper so that bumping into things in the middle of the night will be a thing of the past.

4. End Table Aquarium
I just have a hard time imagining a room that would benefit from an aquarium end table. I do know of a bar that is built on top of an aquarium, so it's not that big of a stretch.

3. Gravity Defying Shoes
I can't recall an issue of SkyMall that didn't have a 2 page spread for the miracle gravity defying shoes. What's the miracle? There are springs in the 2 inch tall heals. I actually met someone, a frequent traveler, who purchased these, and he said it was the best money he ever spent on travel gear; I remain unimpressed.

2. Hot Dog Toaster
This is a toaster specifically designed to toast 2 hotdogs with buns. You'd have to eat a lot of hot dogs for this kitchen device to make sense. You'd be better off with a multi-function piece of kitchen equipment, such as a cast iron skillet.

1. Singing/Talking Elvis Bust
I can't really say a lot about this item beyond what you can gather from the name. Personally I think that it's beyond creepy, but I'm not one to judge people. Oddly enough this item has received 2 reviews, both which were very positive.

There are my top 5, though I'm sure they will change as new and wacky things are added into SkyMall. What are your most memorable things that you recall seeing in an airplane catalog?

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Toilet Humor: A Picture Post

Loyal readers may have noticed that my posts tend to be a little sparse on the picture front. I have various reasons for this but I do recognize that a picture can do things that I can't possibly do with words; so for this post I will let the pictures do the talking (with some commentary of course).

This group of pictures were taken over the past few years and can only be called Toilet Humor:

Washington, D.C. in front of the Washington Monument. The funny thing was that most of these Port-A-Johns were locked with padlocks. Perhaps they unlock more of them for busy days; maybe people rent them as low cost housing.

Men's room at the San Francisco International Airport. Someone had to explain to me that the weight limit was describing the weight of the baby that the diaper would hold and not the amount of waste that it could contain. I was disapointed to learn this.

Paris Charles de Gaulle airport, international terminal. There was, at one point, a path that you could take to get to a restroom but this had been blocked off to add a secondary security checkpoint. The sign was never taken down and the doorway was blocked by a large potted plant. You can draw your own conclusions.

To finish off the group I present a recent picture from my visit to Boston College. That someone chose a "We Recycle" bin to catch the drippings from the broken urinal amuses me to no end. I have resisted photoshopping an extra E into the photo.

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