It's early afternoon and you're on the front end of a 48 hour work trip. You just got off a plane in Cedar Rapids, found a rental car, and drove to the hotel. You've been traveling since 7:00am, the water bottle that you refilled at the connection in Chicago and again at the destination in Cedar Rapids is both disgustingly warm and mostly empty. The rental car was hot as fuck because it's Cedar Rapids in July and the rental cars are sitting in an open lot rather than a garage.
Let's Zork this out.
You need to cool down and rehydrate. Do you:
a) buy a single use refrigerated bottle of water
b) remember that there's a fridge in the room and wait for 2 hours
c) go east
d) get yourself some bucket ice and tap water
Get one cold beverage from the refrigerated section, drink it while getting something hot (I like the chicken fingers and potato wedges all grocery stores seem to have)
Get a 6-pack of something tasty (I like fancy root beer)
Drink cold one on the way back
Put ice on bucket (nobody should be consuming the I've directly) and a couple bottles in the ice, and the rest in the mini fridge
Poop and shower
Enjoy what's left of your evening with the frosty root beers and hopefully still-warm chicken and wedges
I bring my Steam Deck along with me, so I'd much rather stay in with my chicken fingers and soda than meet up with people I probably don't like much anyway.
Not if you want to chill drinks quickly. Not everyone is spending multiple nights in their hotel rooms to have enough time to wait for the fridge to do it's thing.
Let's chill out with the microaggressions. Dead people are still people, they have feelings, and they have every right to chew on hotel ice flavored with Sprite if that's their prerogative.
I haven't been to a hotel in a long long time, at least not in one nice enough to have an icemaker. However, when I was younger I was a lot more cavalier about bacteria, germs, etc. Nowadays, I'm a lot more cautious and probably would not use hotel ice in a drink.