I admittedly have what I would refer to as... an acute Hotel Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. I have a very specific regiment during my hotel stay, that when not followed explicitly, it causes my entire world, as I know it, to collapse.
First and foremost, I immediately throw the bio-hazard bed comforter onto the floor. I do this only because most hotel rooms do not have an incinerator, or even a window that opens wide enough to push it out of. These comforters typically get washed once a decade or so, and the buildup of sheer nastiness that results from a decade of who knows what goes on in a hotel room... I think you get the message. I also lift the mattress and check behind the headboard for bed bugs. Yes, they are a thing. I stayed at a place that we will call the Harriott in Westchester, and was covered in bugs while I slept. I think I'll save that story for another time. It's a good one.
Once I've safely quarantined the bacterial petri dish comforter to the floor, my next task is to inspect the room for hidden cameras or listening devices. I know. I have a problem. Any strange ceiling fixture, blinking red light, or generic clock radio in the room gets a scrutinizing inspection before I can start to relax and settle in. Mirrors also get the "fingernail test" to see if they are two-way mirrors. Did you know, if you touch your fingernail to the mirror, and there is a gap in the reflection, you are looking at a genuine mirror? But if your fingernail touches the glass, and the nail is directly touching the fingernail reflection in the mirror, then you have someone watching you from the other side! Creepy, huh?...that I know that.
Now that you returned from checking a mirror to test this theory, we can continue discussing my mental illness. I do a quick peek underneath the bed to ensure a serial killer hasn't built an apartment under there and simply biding his time until I fall asleep in order to murder me in the night. I'm not exactly sure how I would react if I ever actually found a serial killer underneath my hotel room bed, but I'll check nonetheless. You might think that I'd appreciate the solid enclosure underneath the bed frame in some hotels, however, I've basically broken all of my toes at some point from accidentally kicking these. My toes are undecided if we would rather be murdered in our sleep.
If the room has a personal closet safe, I always look inside as though hoping to discover that it were a bank vault loaded with stacks of wrapped hundred-dollar bills, or blood diamonds. Perhaps criminals mistakenly left jewels or rare coins from a heist? Or maybe my hotel room was the scene of an exchange gone wrong, and the experimental microchip that was stolen from a government testing center along with an encrypted storage device loaded with the information of all undercover CIA from 1965 until present day is waiting silently in that open hotel safe. And at any moment the room phone will ring, and the gruff voice on the phone will tell me that I need to go to the lobby restaurant with these items, and order a breakfast omelette with no eggs, squeeze and entire bottle of ketchup onto the ground while singing "It's a Small World After All", and a briefcase filled with unmarked bills will be dropped at my feet. So far, I have not encountered a random bank vault or loaded safety deposit box in my hotel room. No lost priceless art has been discovered in hotel room safes, as far as I know. I even check underneath that rubber mat at the bottom of the safe, just in case there were to be property deeds, or old stock bonds or something. I'm positive that everyone does this. The weird thing is, if I found someone's forgotten cell phone or wallet, I'd totally turn it in to the front desk. Gold doubloons however, are an entirely different animal. Are they not?
Once I'm convinced that the area is secure, and there is no buried treasure in my room, I place the Do Not Disturb sign outside my door because I don't need any "mints for pillow" at 6am. This sign will stand as a reminder to all suspicious housekeeping staff that I may be sleeping in this room at any given time, so theft of my property is a virtual impossibility. You shall not pass. An unspoken magic hotel spell has been cast upon my door, demons!
My evening in a hotel room typically consists of getting caught up on work. I may occasionally turn on the TV for background noise. I will then become completely engulfed in a series of the most random productions of Swamp People, or Moonshiners, or people grabbing fish with their bare hands, or people flipping crack houses, or pretty much whatever is shown on the History Channel. I may then conduct extensive internet research on random celebrities that I could swear are dead, but find out that they are not. My internet research spirals out of control. (insert funny things to research on the internet). I’ve seen the end of the internet, and I can take you there. My browser history would need a ton of explaining if ever printed out. I'm not sure why this happens, and I suspect some sort of mind control or wizardry. If I haven't fallen asleep, I will realize at some point that I didn't get much work done, and so I'll wake up early in the morning. If you give a mouse a cookie, he might want some milk to go with it. If you give a guy a hotel room, he will find 1,000 different ways to waste time that he will never be able to get back.
So on this particular trip, I'm up late. Since I am checking out in the morning, I start my long checkout process late in the night. The first thing that I do is steal all of the soap. Yes. I have a huge Rubbermaid tub full of soap at home that I plan to someday donate to a homeless shelter. I get a strange sense of accomplishment when the soaps are fancy, massaging, exfoliating or have some exquisite wrapping to them. Look at my collection of hotel soaps. Now look away in disgust. Now stop judging me.
I pack as much of my belongings at night as I can, because my morning routine makes me angry. Worn clothes get stuffed into the plastic laundry bag that hotels have hanging up in the closet. This keeps dirty clothing separated from whatever else I have in my luggage. My electronics are neatly arranged on the nightstand and plugged in so that they can receive a full charge before the next day’s exciting adventure. For some unknown reason, I check all of the drawers and look under the bed for any rogue belongings that might be hiding from me, or attempting to escape. The reason I get frustrated with myself for doing this the night before, is that I will end up doing this again in the morning. I’ll get to that issue in just a moment.
Now fast forward about exactly the amount of time that it would take an average human to fall asleep. The fire alarm goes off. This alarm isn't just a siren, or a "beep beep, excuse me, beep". This fire alarm made you think that we were under hostile enemy fire, and you needed to get out of your hotel room as fast as possible. The speaker inside each hotel bedroom made it very clear that we were all about to die, and it had nothing to do with a murderer underneath our beds.
So I strictly follow the instructions from the recording of Miss "This is not a drill" and head to the nearest staircase. While I'm walking down The Shining murder hallway, I happen to look back and lock eyes with my angry neighbor, Beast. At that instant, I knew that I was not supposed to make eye contact, because eye contact makes them crazy. Since I was in the middle of an emergency evacuation, it was too late to duck and cover, or freeze, or fire off counter-measures, or cover myself with mud or whatever you do to blend into the hotel environment. I suppose I could have covered myself with a bio-hazard comforter, but I had already lit mine on fire by this point. One might argue that this was related to our current predicament, but I would say to "shhhhhh". This would be followed by angry eyebrows, and an index finger placed vertically over my mouthal area.
After we all walked about a mile down the hallway, and down through urinal alley, we all collected together like garbage in the street. Many people shifted their eyes back and forth, both hoping and not hoping to catch a glimpse of a towering inferno. After about fifteen minutes of judging other people's pajamas, or lack thereof in some cases, we were finally met with a late night hotel spokesperson that informed us that our hotel was not burning down, and it was merely a faulty fire sensor that went off due to their late night construction. We all laughed and laughed. The last sentence was left in so that the story has the correct amount of sarcasm. The disappointment of missing a well-deserved community blaze was very evident among this particular company of guests.
The Beast huffed, and charged head-first back into the non-burning hotel like a true hero. The hotel spokesperson melted somehow into the pavement as people began chanting something about a refund and looking for a human sacrifice. That spokesperson was never seen again. I began my fifteenth excursion back to my room in the outback. Once I reached my "Do Not Disturb" room, I entered and immediately collapsed into bed.
So just a few fun hours later, and its 7am the next morning, and I forgot to mention the most frustrating part of my hotel OCD. My exit strategy.
I have a problem. It takes me and extra 15 to 20 minutes to leave my hotel room and head to the lobby to check out. I would say that at this point, my HOCD is at its most extreme. First I turn all the lights on in the room and open the curtains. Next I start checking every single drawer and storage possibility in the room, even though I haven't put anything in a hotel room drawer for the past decade. I start with the first closet or drawer closest to the entryway, then work clockwise throughout the room until everything has been thoroughly inspected. Once I do that, I go through them again. Wait, are the closed drawers and doors checked, or the open ones the checked ones? ####!
Then I make one more check of the bed before I grab my bags and head out through the door and into the hallway. Once the door slams shut behind me, I immediately panic, turn myself around, swipe my key card, and enter the room to check just one more time. This goes on a ridiculous amount of times. I've found more of other people's stuff during this search warrant than I have my own. In fact, I don't think I've ever found any of my own stuff while executing this game plan. I will toss the room like a prison guard tosses a cell, and the room will look like a burglary. I will then feel guilty for leaving the room in such disarray for housekeeping, and I will spend the next ten minutes or so making the bed, and neatly piling any used towels into the bathtub after wiping down the counter. The room will look as though no one stayed in it, which I’m sure throws off the housekeeping staff for a moment, especially since there has been a “Do Not Disturb” sign posted outside the door for days. They would be less surprised to find a dead body in the room than for it to be totally clean and just in need of some fresh towels.
Typically, after my annoying room inspection process is complete, I will decide that it is time to check out of the hotel. Most times I will go to check out through the TV, which is an option that newer hotels have today. I've had yet to ever have this work. Try it yourself if you have some time to kill, and you'll see what I mean. It's great spending 15 minutes to type in your email through a remote control just to get a message that "There was an error with your selection". Let me get this straight... If I lift a 3 oz. bag of roasted almonds from the mini bar for more than 5 seconds, I'll be charged $35 to my credit card instantaneously, but I can't hit a button on the TV remote to let the hotel know that I'm leaving the room on my checkout date? If I never check out, am I now paying rent? Can we please remove this option? I try with futility to check out this way every single time, and it is terrible for the environment because of all of the broken TV remotes that will inevitably end up in landfills after being thrown across the room.
Four days later, once I'm confident enough to hand the keys over to the person at the hotel desk, I walk out into the outside world, and into the social abyss, where I reminisce of fire drills and the Neanderthal neighbor from across the way. Will I run into this guy again? That would be a pretty cool plot twist.
For now, I'll be happy to just hail a smelly taxi cab and get my ass to the airport and home to my family. There's plenty of adventures to talk about later. It is very late as I'm typing this last sentence in my shitty hotel room, and I need to get an early start so I can comb through the room for anything that I might have forgotten. Of course, I need to do that a dozen times or so, until someone tells me to stop.
More adventures await me when the sun crests above the mountain backdrop outside my silken hotel curtains. I just spit out my beer as I typed that. Welcome to my travel adventures!
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