Think about the number of hotel rooms you’ve been in. The swank, the scruffy, the minimalist, the cave-dark. The one with the closet big enough for a family of four; another with nary a hook for your things. Each is so different—and yet they all share one essential quality: they are puzzles that need to be solved, preferably before you go to sleep.

I can’t tell you how many AC remotes I’ve fumbled with, couldn’t find, or finally located only to discover they controlled the TV. Hotel remotes have a gift for being exactly what you don’t need.

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Sometimes a gracious person delivers your bags and offers a room tour, walking you through the vagaries of the thermostat and the location of the safe. But by that point you’re not really listening—you’re exhausted, waiting for the chance to get to the bathroom to pee, and you’re engaged in the silent math of whether you have any cash on you, and if so, whether it’s the right denomination and the right currency to press into this person’s palm without causing offense. The bag carrier may or may not be lingering pointedly. You may or may not be pretending not to notice.

The “what does this switch do?” game is exhausting precisely because you know the answer won’t matter for long. Figure it all out today, and you’ll check out tomorrow.

After years of first-night detective work across four continents, here are the categories that reliably defeat even seasoned travelers.

Tech Trouble: When the Room Is Smarter Than You

I have, on more nights than I care to admit, gone to sleep with a T-shirt draped over a blinking bit of electronics because I could not find any other way to make it stop. These days I don’t dream of traveling without a blackout mask because otherwise, literally, I don’t dream.

The opposite problem hit me recently. I was in the shower when the lights went out—and let me tell you, a windowless bathroom in full darkness is a commitment. I tried the obvious move: waving my arms like someone flagging down a bus. Nothing. I had to call for Mike, and when he opened the door, the lights came back on. The sensor, apparently, required an open door to register human life. This is a fine deterrent to checking Instagram endlessly on the toilet, but the implications for anyone dealing with a genuine digestive emergency are grim.

A reliable portion of any first hour in a new hotel room is spent on hands and knees behind furniture, searching for somewhere to plug in.

By now most of us have learned to slip our key card into the slot by the door if we want electricity to cooperate. I’ve even worked out that a business card fits in most of these contraptions. But at a Swiss hotel, they’d apparently heard about this hack. Their system required an actual metal key, physically turned in a slot. It took embarrassingly long to figure out.

Then there’s the outlet hunt. A reliable portion of any first hour in a new hotel room is spent on hands and knees behind furniture, searching for somewhere to plug in. Hotel room designers seem to share a worldview in which bedside charging is a luxury, not a basic expectation of modern human life. Outlets appear near the minibar, behind the ironing board, and in one memorable case, exclusively in the bathroom—which is how I ended up conducting a Zoom call perched on the edge of a tub, opening the conversation with, “I want to be clear that I am not on the toilet.”

The Accessory Abyss: Thanks for Nothing

Most hotels offer the simple dignity of a door tag: “please clean my room” or “please leave me alone.” Croatia, for reasons that were never explained to me, automated this system that seems to have worked fine on its own for decades. Somewhere in each room was a button that lit up a symbol in the hall, signaling your housekeeping preference. I never found the right button. The symbol outside my door apparently broadcast “do not disturb” for my entire stay, even after I’d appealed directly to the front desk. I got nothing. No fresh towels. No clean glasses. Just a very clear signal that the room had pulled one over on me.

My working theory is that hotels don’t actually want you making your own coffee.

Coffee makers are their own category of obstacle. They’re either hidden like a prize in a scavenger hunt, or they’re sitting in plain sight but functionally baffling. The central challenge is water delivery: how do you fill this thing without soaking your phone and other electronics you’ve had to plug in nearby (see irrationally placed outlets above)? My working theory is that hotels don’t actually want you making your own coffee. They want you downstairs, in the restaurant, ordering from someone who will charge you seven dollars for the privilege.

Bathroom Bungles: A Midnight Obstacle Course

If I wake up in a hotel room at 2 a.m., there is always a beat of pure spatial confusion before I locate the bathroom. Left or right? Near the door or the window? My brain hasn’t caught up to the room yet—and probably won’t, given that I leave before it gets the chance. I try not to turn on the light, out of consideration if I have a roommate and a personal preference because a flash of blinding light almost always keeps me from going back to sleep.

Shower faucets are their own international sport.

Navigating by touch has consequences. Once, certain the toilet was to my left, I stepped confidently in that direction and toppled into the bathtub with a noise I can only describe as load-bearing. My head narrowly missed a protruding soap dish on the way down. The only lasting damage was to my dignity, assisted by the fact that wine had been involved and that I required Mike to pull my sprawled body to an standing position. He has not let it go. I do not expect him to.

Shower faucets are their own international sport. Every country appears to have developed its own system of gadgetry in complete isolation from all others: levers, dials, push buttons, mystery knobs, showerheads that come off the wall in your hand and immediately behave like a garden hose with something to prove. It doesn’t help when the temperature is in centigrade! Somewhere there exists a comedy reel of first-shower moments—the yelps, the scalding water, the desperate reaching for a dial that turns out to control the ventilation fan.

Then there is the classic linguistic trap–“C” and “F” faucets. In Spanish, “C” stands for “Caliente”—hot. “F” is “Frío”—cold. Every trip to Mexico, without fail, someone in our NextTribe group is convinced the hotel has no hot water. They are reaching for the wrong handle with tremendous confidence.

The Bad-Idea Bath (A Cautionary Tale)

My history with hotel bathroom technology should have been warning enough. It was not. In Switzerland last month, I spotted a jacuzzi tub and made a decision that felt reasonable at the time.

For a while, it was glorious. Hot jets working through the kind of muscle soreness that accumulates over days of travel, fragrant bubbles piling up to my nostrils. Then I decided I was done.

I climbed out, located the instruction manual, and discovered it was entirely in German.

The tub had other ideas. I pushed what seemed like the off button. The jets intensified. I tried holding two buttons simultaneously, then a dial on the wall. The faucet began adding more hot water on its own initiative. I climbed out, located the instruction manual, and discovered it was entirely in German.

At some point in my button-pushing, I triggered the ambient lighting. The water, now actively threatening to overflow, began cycling through purple, green, and pin–giving full mermaid disco.

Somehow—I genuinely do not know how—something I pressed brought it all to a stop. It’s possible the whole thing was on a timer. I may never take a bath again.

People say the best part of coming home from a trip is sleeping in their own bed. I understand that. For me, it’s something slightly more specific: being in a space where I know which switch does what, which handle is hot, and where, in the dark, the toilet is.