These days in Israel, anyone who jumps in the shower may well have to jump out again before they’re finished, as missile alerts sound at every hour of the day and night.
People tend to think long and hard before they reach for the hot water tap. But now there are two websites that tell you when the odds of getting clean without interruption are the best: canishower.com/ and bestshowertime.com/.
Both sites feature English and Hebrew versions, and joined Hooked, the meet-singles-in-the-bomb-shelter app, as the latest examples of brilliant resilience from Start-Up Nation.
In “Can I Shower?”, which I was introduced to first, you enter your location, choose a shower duration from 5 to 20 minutes, and get the percentage chance you will have to flee to the shelter in a towel or bathrobe. It calls this “Real Time Risk Assessment.”
Right now, on Friday morning in my area of Jerusalem, if I choose to take a five-minute shower, it says, “Moderate risk – be ready to stop,” and informs me that my odds of being interrupted are 40%. It informs me that “1001 more people are trying to catch the perfect shower window.”
It also shows the time since the last alert (the real alert, not the warning that there may be an alert), the average time between alerts in the area, the total alert count here, and the trend, whether the number of alerts is increasing or decreasing. It’s reassuring to see a downward trend. There’s a multicolored graph showing that the ideal time to shower today is 3:52 p.m.
Shower app not substitute for Home Front Command guidelines
For true shower-odds geeks, the methodology is explained, and you can choose which figures to weigh more heavily.
These include “Core statistical model,” “24 activity vs. typical,” and, this being Israel, “Prayer time bias.” I settled for the default.
At the bottom is a disclaimer that the app is not a substitute for Home Front Command guidelines.
“Can I Shower?” was developed by someone named Matan, while Ben Greenberg, an immigrant from the US, developed “Best Shower Time,” which works along basically similar principles. Both invite users to support the sites by buying them a coffee or maybe some shampoo.
US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee is one of Can I Shower’s fans. In a post on X/Twitter, he said, “You might think this is worthless, but Janet & I appreciate being able to schedule showers when it’s LEAST likely to be interrupted by Iran’s ballistic missiles or drones. When the siren sounds, one only has 90 seconds to get to shelter!”
In a random survey in my building’s bomb shelter, only 30% of respondents thought these sites were worthless, but 100% thought they were a funny idea, so well done, Matan and Ben.
