When every hotel room's a 'double'
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- Опубліковано 11 кві 2023
- Xyla Foxlin, Becky Stern and Jordan Harrod face a question about a seemingly superfluous sign.
LATERAL is a weekly podcast about interesting questions and even more interesting answers, hosted by Tom Scott. For business enquiries, contestant appearances or question submissions, visit www.lateralcast.com
GUESTS:
Xyla Foxlin: @xylafoxlin, / xylafoxlin
Becky Stern: @BeckyStern, / bekathwia
Jordan Harrod: @JordanHarrod, / jordanbharrod
HOST: Tom Scott.
QUESTION PRODUCER: David Bodycombe.
RECORDED AT: Podcasts NZ Studios.
EDITED BY: Julie Hassett at The Podcast Studios, Dublin.
GRAPHICS: Chris Hanel at Support Class. Assistant: Dillon Pentz.
MUSIC: Karl-Ola Kjellholm ('Private Detective'/'Agrumes', courtesy of epidemicsound.com).
FORMAT: Pad 26 Limited/Labyrinth Games Ltd.
EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS: David Bodycombe and Tom Scott.
© Pad 26 Limited (www.pad26.com) / Labyrinth Games Ltd. 2023. - Розваги
I love how much they got into the anecdotes after they answered the question :)
The tangents are what make it great.
For sure! Somehow the involvement of an inebriated, dressing-gown-clad Scotsman makes Tom's story even better!
I think everybody who's been a student and lived in Halls has a fire alarm anecdote that generally revolves around standing around in drizzle, half-cut, while someone is bollocked by other students, Student Services - or on one memorable occasion the fire brigade.
I myself have performed a variation on the role of "Drunk Scotsman in Shopping Trolley" we shall call "Drunk Englishman with Black Eye and Stitches Leaning on Hockey Stick" (mixed hockey on a "sporting" grass pitch caused me more injuries than rugby ever did) asking in best Sergeant Wilson tones if the idiot freshers would awfully mind not lighting joss-sticks in the middle of the effing night.
@@chaoticneutral6288 why?
Bit sad he cut her off
"The dogs that can read" feels like it should be a card in Cards Against Humanity.
I believe it is the new fire code in New York City. Last year they installed a second apartment number sign about 6 inches off the ground in my building.
Back in college we used to have fire alarms quite often. One time apparently someone was baking bread in the oven and left it until it turned to charcoal. On my way back inside after the all-clear, I saw that someone had used the bread to write "learn to cook!" in charcoal on the hallway door.
I remember the fire alarm going off in university residence due to some kid not understanding that when making boxed macaroni and cheese, you need to add water to the pasta when boiling it. The same genius also thought reheating a pizza for an hour in a box with the oven was a good idea.
was he from a richer houshold by any chance?
@@dovos8572 I don't know. Most of the time, I found that rich kids tried to downplay their wealth. The only exception that I can remember is a kid who drove his dad's DeLorean to residence and parked out front with the gull wings left open.
@@dovos8572 What does that have to do with anything? That sounds like a perfectly reasonable mistake for anyone to make. Deducing from first principles the correct amount of time to reheat pizza doesn't seem possible.
This is a universal experience I'm pretty sure
@@ShankarSivarajan It's a reasonable mistake for an 8 year old. A teenager, especially one that is in university, should be able to understand that cooking cardboard in an oven for an hour is stupid.
I know people who would accidentally set off the fire alarm (from smoking/vaping) and then purposely burn popcorn or Mac and cheese to cover up the real reason the alarm went off.
Much like my high school when people would sit out of the Back Plain in the summer burning pungent, smoky, rose-scented joss sticks to cover their smoking.
I only watch the videos you upload. The podcast would be too long to listen and I really need the visuals. I appreciate the uploads.
I don't mind the length, but the visuals just add a lot.
Same, I love 'watching' podcasts. I really enjoy having the visuals.
I've made an entire exercise in the computer room at my university when the alarm was going off. They did it on a Friday when they knew there were deadlines ... nobody got up and just continued and was like "if there is a fire they will get us" and fortunately after about an hour the alarm stopped. Nobody came until the firemen got in after the fire drill was over for a final check and they were not amused to find a room with about 60 students still there. At that point though they didn't bother to go at us any more but just wrote up the report that the people actually checking the rooms missed an entire computer room full of people (that is not the firemen's job here!). Those alarms are loud, but not missing a deadline is worth the hearing damage!
i was also on the faculty student council at my uni and we had a learning room that we managed...
i also remember that we got scolded more than once for students not leaving the room when they did fire drills... well some smartass seemingly had decided it would be a great idea to do these drills every year right before finals so the room was always crammed with students desperately trying to learn programming or algebra
@@TheScarvig :
What probably really happened was that nobody decided to do any fire drills ... until they realized the school was about a month from getting fined and had less than two weeks to avoid it.
I remember an alarm while we were working flat-out for a deadline in early-94. Towards the end of term, access to computers was really tight and the ops got really strict with session lengths in the Open Access computer centre (OA). The fire alarm went off and nobody moved. Everyone knew that, since the OA had been struck by lightning (yes, really!) the previous summer term, the fire alarm had bee twitchy and there had been lots of false alarms. So nobody moved...even when lecturers and ops were yelling at people to get out...a some blokes came piling through, looked at us all sat there, and told us there was literal smoke coming from the chemistry storeroom down the corridor.
We practically teleported to the assembly point!
Apartment complex I lived in during college in Chicago was constantly blaring a fire alarm at night. The first time it happened all my roommates but one bolted. We came back and he was still snoozing. And being the first time it happened, I felt terrible that we just left this guy in there, but mostly we were amazed how he could possibly sleep through that deafening noise.
"If a bachelor student cannot sleep with light and noise, than they don't really want to sleep"
Becky with the big brain!
It me!
@@BeckyStern 🏆
The ridiculousness of fire safety not being taken seriously because were so used to drills bugs me so much. At least at school we knew the drills always came just before and just after summer break. Other alarms were taken seriously, because they were at least not drills.
However, I once stood outside a Motel One in Berlin at eleven at night, on a not particularly warm fall night in my underwear, and particularly grumpy because evidently I was the only one who took fire safety at all seriously (everyone else basically assumed it was a false alarm and took their damn time. To be fair, it was false.) Even the staff didn't take it particularly seriously. I think the bar continued serving people in the lobby, for god's sake!
I think the issue is that it's so commonly known as a prank in hotels, that it's lost all meaning as an emergency signal.
Boy who cried wolf, but in an even deadlier format!
The ridiculousness of not announcing your drills. It doesn't matter if knowing it's a drill causes some people to stay in their rooms, it just gives staff more procedures to practise.
Its not really drills that people assume. Its miss alarms from burnt food, dust in the smoke sensors etc.
XYLA! Not necessarily unexpected but definitely welcome
I always love it when I figure out the answer on my own minutes minutes before the contestants do, yet without having had the foreknowledge. It really gives me those old fashioned quiz vibes from television.
I got it pretty much straight away - which is unusual for me!
Dont know about Easy Mac, may just not have been a thing at my school. The classic fire alarm trigger was burning microwave popcorn.
Tom's comments about grumpiness at false alarms is bang on, but i also can xonfirm that there us a fery different attitude when it is a real fire.
I thought of those Japanese cell hotels where you get small nooks in the wall, one bed each. Two nooks one over the other, you get a number above and a number a foot off the ground.
I was once staying in a motel near Orlando, Florida, and the fire alarm went off at like 2am. I distinctly remember waking up with the high-pitched screaming of the alarm, feeling extremely disoriented, and immediately calling reception to ask them to shut the noise off, only to be told "sir, it's a fire alarm, please evacuate". Which in fairness, I then did, and there's an excellent photo of me standing outside grinning like an idiot in front of a fire truck.
On the uni anecdote, first year of uni it was a common occurrence that people would come back drunk at 3am, and find it hilarious to use hairspray to set off the block's fire alarm. You could always tell who it was because they were usually the only ones fully dressed.
Someone in my dorm freshman year made the fire alarm go off at 3am by trying to cook easy-mac in the microwave WITH NO WATER. To this day, the university sends out an email every, single semester reminding everyone that they need water to cook mac'n'cheese.
I lived in an all masonry complex at university. Every room was fire walled and you had these big hunky doors. When the fire alarm went off there was a notice telling you to be ready to evacuate and so you'd know why you were hearing a faint alarm. But the alarm would only go off in the room that was set off. It was sweet. Fire alarms in the building were set off about once a month due to vaping. If the fire marshal doesn't arrive on time the entire building automatically sets off all alarms along with an announcer voice. Could we please just build all buildings this way?
My college dorm was a concrete brutalist brick. One of the things long term residents could do was point out the window where the big fire had been, twenty years earlier; it had completely burned one dorm room. Needless to say, there wasn't a trace of it left by our time and the room was in use.
I always lied off-campus. During my first year I was especially gald because the halls had a fire drill during a a sleet storm. It was, apparently, a tradition that during the first seriously inclement night of the spring term the staff would stage a snap fire drill and keep everyone on the front lawn until they had accounted for all residents, like they're supposed to. Then they gave them a ticking-off about taking so long to get out.
I've replayed grumpy Scotsman Tom like 10 times, I don't know why I like listening to that so much
I feel smart now because navigation in a fire is the first thing I thought of.
🎖Awesome!
I got this right immediately, because some hotels also have exit signs at the same height.
I was at a hotel in Houston once for a convention with a group. Wasn’t the best hotel, exactly (even if it -looked- nice), but one of the more fun parts was that the fire alarm had went off at 23:40, right as we were about to go to bed to wake up at 6.
That fire alarm was scarily quiet. I think they were only in the one stairway the hotel had, and you’d think it was coming from another building, or just a police siren for like 5 minutes until it struck me that it was probably a fire alarm. I had to wake up my friend who was a light sleeper, even.
Needless to say, that place was not in compliance with the fire code. To compliment our luck, the fire alarm had went off at the convention too, at least three times.
Yeah fire safety makes sense. Would be more fun if it was for small cleaning robots though.
The problem with hotel fire alarms is that in a lot of places they get set off by somebody using too much hairspray or too much axe body spray in their room. And after that happens a few times you just stop believing in fires.
I slept through an entire fire alarm. Was really angry when my friend woke me up to check on me.
oh hey, after however many clips there's been this is the first I've actually known already!
Back when I worked at a hotel, a cook set off the fire alarm by burning caramelized sugar. Well, it was a fun and noisy 15 minutes until the firefighters arrived to turn the alarm off. There was never a fire, just a lot of smoke.and it was also quite expensive for the hotel. 2500€ just for the fire fighters to arrive and turn a switch.
When I was first year university and in halls, there were so many fire alarms going off that students started to not leave their rooms. So one night they did a drill and didn’t let us back in until every single room was checked and they reprimanded those who didn’t leave.
Examples of fire alarms were, burned cooking of course but also, rival halls pranking and once someone trying to sneak someone into the dorm after hours using the chaos of the crowd going back in.
So a big memory of that first year of university for me is standing outside halls in the middle of the night due to a fire alarm going off.
that detterent against setting up the alarm might be the best prevention of fire in the first place,
speakin of, i currently live in a house without fire alarms, i know it’s unsafe but when they were installed, you could be cooking a pizza and not even burn it and they would go off, and so i have no idea what level of smoke i can get away with in the kitchen without starting a fire, when it’s not good grill weather and i’m browning brats on the stove, it can get hazy inside, and so i have no idea if when i move out for college or whatever if i will have to change the way i cook to accommodate smoke detectors
When I went to college my mom asked me if I wanted to be in the dorms. My response was "No, absolutely not! Are you kidding me?! All the stupid immature people are going to be there!" So glad with my choice. I got to be in an apartment complex full of more responsible people with more then half a brain. Each apartment had their own individual fire alarms too, and I don't remember any incidents besides contained smoke in the kitchen in the middle of the day.
OF COURSE Jordan immediately went to "tiny robots".
That's why the doors are numbered in her apartment, right? :-)
before watching (im 0:33 seconds in) here is my guess. POSSIBLE SPOILER(?) BELOW
i think its for if there is a fire, those people crawling to avoid the smoke may be able to tell the room numbers?
Good call. I totally thought it was for children.
Was thinking about drunk people that would only need to stand up when they found the correct room...
When I was at uni, our entire dorm building was evacuated around 10PM for a fire alarm. It was caused by a couple of girls who decided to make popcorn that night and somehow managed to burn it so badly it set off the alarm for everyone.
This one was way too obvious to me, but I have been through about a month worth (total) of actual firefighting training, with (typically petroleum) fire and its very dense smoke: On my first round in 1982 I could not see the actual fire until it was less than 1.5 m away, I was approaching it under the protective water/fog blanket of a fire hose set to maximum spread, and only the floor was really visible as I crouched down. In offshore oil structures (as well as most passenger boats and planes) you will see luminous arrays on the floor/lowest part of the wall pointing you towards the nearest exit.
Another one I guessed immediately. I've had a few now.
Was immediately thinking pod/capsule hotels with two levels.
People at my Uni halls worked out that if you put a sock over the detector it wouldn't set off the alarm. We eventually realised that you didn't need the sock
Once my family stayed at a hotel for thanksgiving dinner, and they had a fire alarm go off. I slept through it. My family wondered where I was, I was sound asleep lol.
I'll watch Xyla any time ! ... nice to see she is OK now !
Why? What happened to her?
I had to write an essay on fire safety too lol, albeit only for having a candle
When i was at uni the fire alarm went off all the time, for some reason it wasnt just my block the next unconnected block seemed to be linked to the same alarm. pretty sure it was usually drills but seemed like once or twice a week. When they were feeling unusually cruel they did it on Thursday (the day after student night). Noone respected it at all. 'One second' [goes back in comes out a while later with a duvet] 'oh wait i forgot something...' [goes back in comes out with a packet of biscuits'
someone else: '... i'm going to make tea...anyone want one?'
One time i was so tired i refused to move. I stayed in bed half asleep. Someone knocked on my door (which was weird) but nothing else happened.
50 seconds in and I'm going with "for firefighters in heavy smoke".
I would have asked if Xyla did rocket stuff in her room, but then she told by herself 😆
I need stuff with Xyla involved!
This is something I dont get whit so many fire alarm system and that is trigger one larm all allarms in the whole building goes off.
(even if the building is like 2 Kilometers long (2 floor high and normal sized wide).
there is no (one alarm trigger in one room) just have it ring in that room and the room next door.
if two alarms are trigger next to each other ring the whole building.
because I dont know how many toast I made have triggers the fire alarm (and there wasn´t even any smoke) just that the toaster (been at the only place we could place it) was not next to the air
duck for the oven.
So, when I was, like, 14, we stayed at what was then a brand new hotel at Universal Orlando.
It has literally been open, like a month.
It’s 1:30 AM… and a loud sound starts. My mother thinks it’s the alarm clock for a moment, gets up, puts on her glasses and realizes the room looks funny…
Because she has put in MY glasses…
And it’s by this point all of us are awake and we realize it’s the fire alarm.
We go down the fire stairs into the lobby to discover several people had just pulled the alarms as a bad prank…
Problem was the hotel could not get the alarm to shut off. They had to call the Fire Department to come and turn it off…
Amusingly, the need for fire safety in dorms is why we have the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (IIRC, the students who started it were making rocket fuel in a dorm room).
Usually in Aus there's two alarms, first one is be alert, be ready to evacuate, the second one is evacuate.
Initial thoughts: before even the question was made known, by the thumbnail and title, I would say that it's like the baths in Japanese traditional "Ryokan" hotels. Blue color for male, red for female. So they are two "separate" rooms, yet sharing the same physical space, depending on the timing.
(Edit: corrected grammar.)
After the question was asked, and going along with my previous stipulation: males are statistically taller than females, so the _eye-level_ changes by about a foot.
After the question was answered: those thumbnails lied to me. Only slightly, I haven't came close to the proper answer.
On the bright side, if there's a fire no one will panic
This one took me about two seconds. I felt it was very obvious. 🙂
I believe the "firefighter might see room numbers" is more likely, given that all you need to get out is an arrow pointing at the closes emergency exit. There are floors with fluorescent markings in hotels as well as air planes to help with evacutation.
Did you go to oxford Tom?
Also I hadn’t thought of this before but Ona ferry I go on that’s an overnight ferry there’s often signs near floor level for life boats and stuff like that and I think that may be the same thing
I rang reception once when there was an alarm at a hotel. Turned out it was somebody's car alarm so I went back to bed.
Hmm I know that some hotels have their evacuation plans on the floor in case you can't read the eye level plans anymore due to the smoke.
Decades ago, during my uni hall of residence fire drills (we were told the day and rough time only), about 11pm those who'd evacuated and gathering outside could watch people still evacuating, noticing who was dressed and who was in pyjamas. The male and female quarters had separate exits, and the hall's rule was that men and women shouldn't be in each other's quarters after 10pm (in an attempt to prevent sex) and a female porter was placed on guard during the night (culprits had to escape via the fire escape if they wanted hall breakfast). But there were always some shamefaced people exiting from the wrong place. Everyone knew what they'd been doing and they received a mix of jeers and cheers. We reckoned the fire drill was held after 10pm to catch those people out so they could be fined; likewise I recall one fire drill at 6 am. Interestingly, more women came from the men's quarters, as if the men expected the women to do all the sneaking around.
I went to a boarding school, and I knew that every couple of weeks SOMEBODY would have us dragged out onto the tennis court in our PJ'S because a top year had decided to have a late night cheese on toast. Brilliant. I knew how to make cheese on toast safely, so when it was my turn, I never got the fire alarm. (But cheese accidentally walked into the carpet? That might have been me......😉
Immediate guess: if there's a fire you go down to be under the smoke so eye level in that event is about a foot from the ground. Not wholly sure why knowing your room number in that event would be vital.
I'm don't know whether the ideal solution for the show is a sudden inspiration like Becky for this one are grinding out the solution by logic
Immediate guess: Roombas / other small robots
I was hoping this was about why hotel rooms are alternating mirror-images, with doors adjacent in pair. Now I'm curious about that question.
I would assume it helps with plumbing, having two bathrooms back to back at a time.
Hotel and low numbers? Smoke/fire safety
Having lived in a building with an oversensitive fire alarm that went off an average of once a week, so that the time there actually was a fire nobody left until someone came banging on the door and somebody died, I now panic if I ever hear something that sounds like a fire alarm.
did she say she got disciplined for violating fire safety by BUILDING A ROCKET?
Because when there’s a fire, I’d like to know the number of my room?? Or the one I’m passing??
Kinda pointless.
I got that it is because people are crawling, but I thought it was because they were drunk. Didn't make the jump to fire.
I'm quite envious of the anecdote from Becky regarding being left alone to 'get on with the job'.
As far as training a workforce, or in my case 'growing new engineers', any employer requiring an employee to have a particular skill should assume responsibility for training the employee in that skill, therefore growing the national capability and their own skill base in their industry, which in turn assists in advancing the national capability economically & academically...a sort of spend to make paradigm.
Unfortunately the 'quick buck' method seems to predominate.
at my old high school, the fire alarm systems were faulty, which meant that the fire alarm was going off constantly, and by constantly i mean usually 2-4 times a day. No one ever paid any attention to the alarms, you didn't leave the classroom unless it was a planned fire-drill. Otherwise, you just waited until they turned off the alarm and an "all-clear" announcement came over the intercom. It's not the worst at my school where most of the buildings are brick and the buildings that are made of wood are in their own little area, so there's very little chance that an actual fire would actually spread very far, but still... you are creating a generation of students who will have a slow response to fire alarms
The last times it was a failure, not even a drill.
1:56 Tom, the system is not broken. The system is working exactly as designed, which is why is must be destroyed.
Xyla is there with rocket motors in her dorm and I thought I was bad? All I had was lipos and a 3D printer, never got in trouble yet though, but no-one knows they are there. You aren’t supposed to have electric heaters or cooking equipment in your room but a 3D printer doesn’t come under that really, probably less dangerous than a set of hair straighteners.
lateral
so true bestie ✨
@@soupontherocks agreed
with
Like in the last hotel where i was there was a fire alarm
What happend, someone was a very bad cook, absolutly no danger of a fire.
And these things happen often
If it was for robots they wouldn't be numbers, they would be bar or QR codes.
this was the easiest one to guess so far
Yes, because a lot of people actually know that one.
@@MyRegardsToTheDodo i had never heard of it or seen it before though.
Rocket matters? Weed?
I haven't heard the term before.
Rocket motors she said, I presume she is talking about the cardboard tubes filled with black powder, or similar powder that burns real fast, that act as solid fuelled rocket motors for model rockets.
Ok, but Jordan's right, why aren't more hotels doing this? Heck everywhere?
I don't get it. Why would you want to know a room number when you need to get out during a fire?
did the drunk scotsman in a wedding gown being pushed in a shopping cart also happen to walk into a bar?
Contrary to a lot of comments, I actually prefer these five-minute chunks instead of a whole 45 minutes because I can then watch it during a work break. Also, and this has absolutely nothing to do with the content of the videos, every time the music stops and then restarts, such as at 6:17, I sing 🎶Batman! 🎶 to myself.
Can't cook mac & cheese in college?! Wtf, kids these days are getting to college before learning basic bachelor food prep...
All of the sudden, the ending to book 12 of A Series of Unfortunate Events became a lot more believable.
Xyla just wanted people to think about her naked and I did.