The Gym Shower Rant

So I went to the gym at lunchtime, which was fine. Afterwards, I went for a shower, of course. And there my woes began...

As discussed previously, getting a good temperature setting on a shower is an exercise in frustration. But today that wasn't the issue.

On most home showers, there's some sort of on/off control - press a button when you want to start a shower, press it again when you're done. But for gym showers that doesn't work: inevitably a minority of customers will fail to stop the shower, and huge amounts of energy and water will be wasted. So there has to be some sort of automatic cut-off. (That of course means that a minority of selfish muppets have ruined it for everyone else. Which basically describes the whole world.)

In every gym and swimming pool I've seen, the solution to this has been to have a button that switches on the shower for a limited time, before it then cuts off again. And that's okay, I guess... most of the time.

Where it doesn't really work is when that cutoff time is set to about 3 seconds. Or, more accurately, the exact amount of time it takes to get your shampoo lathered up so that you can't open your eyes to see the button to press it again.

Honestly, is it really too much to ask that the cutoff be set to a decent length of time? Granted, setting it to 1 minute would lead to an average of 30 seconds of wasted time, but is that truly so terrible? (And if it really is, I could accept a 30 second cutoff, leading to an average of 15 seconds of waste.)

Better still, of course, would be to fit the shower with an automatic sensor, just like the toilets in the same gym use to control their auto-flush - press the button to start, and then it will detect when you move away and stop the shower automatically.