I’m a pilot and there’s a trick I use on every hotel stay to make sleep easier
A PILOT has revealed the clever trick he uses when he stays at hotels so he can sleep.
Ron Wagner, who claims to be an airline pilot on the forum Quora, said he often had a strange experience while staying at hotel rooms between flights.
The main issue was waking in the night fully disoriented, which many called a form of sleep disorientation, which is having no idea where you are.
Ron said: "The room was totally pitch black and I needed to pee. I lay there with my eyes wide open looking around, trying to find some visual clue. Nothing. Total blackness."
"Not only could I not recall the city, but I didn’t even know how to get up. Where was the wall? Where was the lamp? Which way to the bathroom?"
He revealed a clever hack that he learned from other crew to make sure you always have some light in your room while sleeping.
He continued: ";The hack is to turn on the bathroom light and leave the door cracked just the tiniest bit. The light coming through that crack will give you your bearings.
"If the curtains don’t fully block the light, you don’t need to do this, so the real hack is to make sure there is some sliver of light somewhere to help you recall where you are.
"Even then I still awoke every once in a while wondering what city I was in, but it turns out that just a few orienting clues in the sliver of light were all I needed to recall."
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Lots of other people said they had similar experiences.
Someone wrote: "I traveled extensively for business for much of my career and I went through precisely this learning process myself. Nice to see I wasn’t alone!"
Another person agreed: "I see I was not the only pilot who did that."
One person said: "I was sometimes so tired that I got off a plane, walked down the jetway, and had no idea what city I was in."
Someone else shared their own hack: "I bring a flashlight and place it on the nightstand. Also, if the power is off and I need to evacuate, I still have light."
A common horror story was using the entrance door rather than the bathroom door - and getting locked out in the middle of the night.
A flight revealed that when he arrives in his room, he opens the door and flips the lock open so the latch is sticking out, keeping the door from shutting.
The latch holds the door open so if John steps out for just a moment, the door can't shut behind him and lock him out - which some of his crew experienced, having embarrassing walks half-naked to reception.
He wrote: "The great invention of the inside door latch has saved many from embarrassment."
If you don't want light in your room, a travel expert has revealed the clever way to stop light coming through the curtains.
