Sounds Like Weird
15 October 2005
So, here I am, at 2 a.m. on Sunday morning. Couldn’t get to sleep, so I got up for an hour, then tried to go to bed.
I hear one of those sounds one should not hear — wet, gurgling, splashing sounds. Yep, toilet overflowing.
So, naturally, this means I needed to get up again, get fully dressed, call the lobby, then wait. They didn’t have a plumber on-site, so that means that I get to throw a pile o’ towels onto the floor of the bathroom and hope that the water doesn’t land in the room below and ruin their night as well.
Fortunately for me, I have two bathrooms.
Last night, I had finally managed to get deeply asleep when the smoke alarm goes off. At 4:42 a.m. I bolted out of bed landing in a standing position (rather like a penguin shooting up out of the water). I’m not actually certain that it was my smoke alarm, but that’s what it sounded like. The noise stopped before I could figure out exactly where it was.
Having been in an office building that had a fire once, I naturally couldn’t get back to sleep, so I was tired all day Saturday.
Oh, and did I mention that this is my second room? Yes, it is!
You see, I was booked into a suite. I’ve worked in the hotel industry, and I’ve got to say, I’ve never heard of a second-floor walkup suite outside of, say, Santorini.
So, they sort of drew an arrow toward the back of the property when I checked in, so I trundled my luggage down there, looking wistfully at the stairs. I decided to take my handbag up first, checking to make sure I knew where the room was before lugging my baggage up the stairs.
That was a great idea, as it turns out because when I went to swipe my card in the gate, I only saw a red light. Tried the other card. Same deal. Naturally, I’d left the hotel info at the bottom of the stairs (in the top pocket of one of my bags), so I went back down the stairs to call the hotel from my cell. They sent a guy to help me. His keys wouldn’t open the gate either, so he went around the other way. Yes, the shorter way no one had mentioned earlier.
Turns out the battery had fallen out (!) of the card reader “a few minutes ago.” Hrm.
Much to my disappointment, the room wasn’t really anything like a suite. It was a double hotel room with two large beds. In other words, no sitting area, which is pretty much what defines the word “suite” for me. Naturally, they were sold out, so there wasn’t any place to move me that night. However, they did say that they’d move me the next day. So, when I left for RubyConf’s Friday morning session, I made sure that everything was back in the suitcase for the move.
When I got out of the day’s session, I found that they had moved me to another room that was really a suite. It even had elevator access. And, for a brief moment, I was happy.
There were, however, elevator issues. At the end of the day, the elevator didn’t ascend. Apparently people hadn’t been very careful about the maximum capacity of four people and had overcrowded the elevator, causing it to sulk and fail to respond to commands. This isn’t unusual for elevators, and is one of the reasons that science fiction conventions (the smart ones, anyway) have “elevator party hosts” to prevent overcrowding and unhappy elevators.
They went to reset the breaker for the elevator and it happily carried me onto my destination.
Anyhow, all this is a very long-winded (45 minutes for me) way of saying that if I look ragged and tired tomorrow, I have good reason.
I just hope I’m able to get an actual night’s sleep tomorrow night, you know?