We're staying in an Airbnb in Barcelona and it has a bad shower; actually two of them, as it's got two and both are equally terrible.

First, I have to take a detour here and say I'm not even susprised at this point; our Airbnb experiences have been hit and miss, with more of the latter. I'm starting to dislike Airbnb, to the point that renting flats there makes me anxious; so I do it less and less often, and experiences like this will keep making it more sporadical. In this case I decided to give Airbnb another chance because we were a group of friends getting together in the same city, so a bigger flat instead of a number of hotel rooms seemed like a good idea; and also it was a way to treat my friends to a place to stay. I wanted to get a nicer place and I actually spent more than I set out to just to make that more likely -- I guess I screwed up.

This place is pretty characteristic of my average Airbnb experience; it sucks, and it disappoints you in every way it can while staying just reasonable enough that you can't outright ask for a refund. Sure, it's not super clean -- but it doesn't have garbage on the floors or anything. Sure, the furniture is all flimsy and sad, but you do get a bed and the minimum number of wobbly chairs. Everything is the cheapest possible thing you could get; I didn't even know they made microwaves as crappy as the one in the kitchen, which has an analog knob with a one minute granularity only (this is worse than my first microwave twenty-five years ago). I'm reasonably certain that spending even an extra five euro on the thing would improve it significantly, but no way the Airbnb management company would do that.