Few things can make you appreciate home like staying in a hotel.
This includes not only low-budget, bare bones hotels but also
sweepingly large and ornate luxury hotels. What many hotels seem to
have in common are needless hassles.
Since most people who stay in hotels do so while traveling, and
stay only a few days in a given hotel, you might think that those
who run hotels would want to make it easy for someone who arrives a
little tired (or a lot tired) from traveling to use the various
devices they find in their hotel room. But you would be wrong. That
thought never seems to have crossed their minds.
Recently, at a well-known luxury hotel in Los Angeles, I found
that something as simple as turning on a television set can require
a phone call to the front desk, and then waiting for the arrival of
a technician. Then it took another phone call to get a list of
which of the dozens of channels were for which networks.
Why the turning on of a television set should be anything other
than obvious to a newly arrived hotel guest is apparently a
question that never occurred to the people who ran this hotel. Nor
did it apparently ever occur to them that someone just arriving
from a journey might want to be able to relax, instead of having to
cope with complications that the hotel could easily have
avoided.
The next morning, in the shower, I found myself confronted with
a dazzling array of knobs and levers, none of which provided any
clue as to what they did. The lever rotated and four of the
surrounding knobs both rotated and tilted forward and backward.
Apparently it was not considered sporting to come right out and
tell you how to get hot water or cold water. That was something you
could find out for yourself by being either scalded or chilled.
Being fancy and opaque seemed to be the guiding principle.
Getting on the Internet required another phone call to the front
desk. In fact, it required two phone calls, because I was first
referred to the wrong technical support group.
It is easier to get on the Internet at almost any institution
other than a hotel. And, at this particular hotel, you had to go
through the whole procedure every day, instead of just signing up
for Internet access for your entire stay when you checked in or
logged on.
Being a luxury hotel, this one provided bathrobes. But I had my
own bathrobe. At least I had it until the maids took it away when
cleaning the room while I was out. Another phone call to the front
desk.
Since my bathrobe was a white, terry-cloth robe and the hotel’s
robes were a light tan and made of a different material, I thought
there was no danger that one would be mistaken for the other. But I
was wrong.
Just how wrong I discovered when, after a long delay, late at
night when I wanted to get to sleep, a man appeared with a large
bag containing two bathrobes. Apparently their search had also
turned up another guest’s bathrobe that the maids had taken. It
looked even less like the hotel’s bathrobe than mine did.
Something as simple as turning on a light can be a puzzle at
some hotels. Again, the fatal allure of the fancy seems to be the
problem with people who choose things to put in hotel rooms.
Moreover, it is not uncommon for different lamps in the same hotel
room to have different fancy ways of being turned on.
Years ago, at a hotel where I stayed for a week, it was only on
the last day that I finally figured out, or stumbled on, the way to
turn one of the floor lamps off and on.
Since I was very busy on that trip, I didn’t feel like adding
this to the list of things to phone the front desk about,
especially late at night, when I was more interested in getting to
sleep than in waiting for some technician to show up and unravel
the mystery.
After my misadventures in Los Angeles, I was off to San Diego,
where a hotel maid had to replace a light bulb in the bedroom and a
technician had to fix a lamp in the living room. Later I had to fix
a toilet that kept running after being flushed. I once had a toilet
like that at home, so I knew what to do. But I replaced my
malfunctioning toilet at home, unlike the hotel.
No amount of fancy things makes up for hassles.
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