In my own humble estimation, I’m a decently savvy traveler. I thought I knew my ass from a hole in the ground when it comes to wake-up calls. It turns out I was wrong.
Living the homeless life (literally speaking) as I am, I stayed in the Holiday Inn Stuttgart this week for some meetings in between excursions to the Czech Republic and Italy. I could dedicate an entire rantpost to the finer points surrounding why “Holiday Inn Stuttgart” is a misnomer, but I’ll keep it to this: If your address, literally translated, contains the word “village” and, on top of that, you see rolling green hills and fields in an uninterrupted 270 degree panorama from the from the hotel, you’re NOT IN THE CITY and shouldn’t put the city name on your hotel. Our corporate travel agency was also duped by this, as I had asked for a hotel downtown. Live and learn! Oh, and don’t get me started about how I stayed in a hotel that represents the worst of blah Americana in the middle of Europe.
Back to the wake-up call. I had a late night last night, and what with having reservations on an early train this morning and all, decided to back up my phone’s alarm with an early wake-up call. Predictably enough, as 6am rolled around, I elected to ignore the wake-up call and wait for my phone 15 minutes later! Just as in hotels everywhere, I picked up and hung up the phone thinking that it was a call from the wake-up computer (I dub it the Wakeup-a-ma-tron 3000).
Annoyingly enough, a few minutes later the phone rang again! Aha! A persistent machine! I picked up, hung up, and rolled over for a few more minutes of hard-earned sleep. This repeated several times more over the next minutes – and at one point, I even put the phone to my ear to see if someone was there. Nothing! It was a machine! I was getting pissed – it was like having an alarm clock with no off button, only a 2 minute snooze, but finally the ringing stopped.
Then came the knocking, followed by a muffled voice outside saying “Reception!” Running through my mental checklist of what could be going wrong, I thought… Housekeeping? No, they’d say “Housekeeping!” Hotel on fire? *sniff* *sniff* No smoke, therefore not on fire enough to get out of bed. Did my car explode in the parking garage? Eh, it’s a rental. All possibilities were considered and ruled out, and so I stayed in bed, waiting for the knocking to go away, and hoping against hope it was actually for the room next door.
It didn’t go away. Soon thereafter, came that telltale noise of the keycard being swiped in my door. Luckily, after having been barged in on by numerous housekeepers, I lock my door at night like a man with OCD. I was particularly proud of having engaged the anti-housekeeping do-not-come-into-the-room-because-your-housekeeping-key-will-not-work deadbolt. There was no WAY that guy was getting in.
And he didn’t – at least not yet. The knocking and swiping stopped, and I relaxed, ready to embrace those precious 4 minutes of remaining sleep time. Wait, not so fast. I had just closed my eyes when it starts again! And he’s swiping a card again. And this time, he GETS IN! Wtf??! He got the override key!
Luckily, anticipating just such a scenario (or, alternately, embracing a budding case of OCD) I had also engaged the door chain. Mr. Reception Guy wouldn’t be deterred, though. He slammed the door against the chain several times for good measure before starting to call through the crack“Reception! Reception!” Not satisfied, he reached his hand inside and turned on all the lights.
It then dawned on me… This guy was on a mission, and was not about to give up without evidence of my consciousness. I belted out one slightly hoarse and mildly annoyed “HELLO?!”
And the door slammed shut. I heard not another peep after that. Come on, Holiday Inn! A man’s hotel room is his castle. The moral of this story? Choose the Holiday Inn Stuttgart if you want to pay city prices to live in a field – OR, if you sleep like the dead and just can’t miss that 6am meeting