Hotel report thing

As promised yesterday, here's my report as posted on our intranet at work, about the hotel I was at last week...

It always seems to be the case that when I have dozens of bags, I’m given a room in an incredibly difficult part of the hotel to reach. On this occasion I had a holdall, my work bag, a laptop, and a Starbucks coffee cup in my hands, and my room was at the end of a winding corridor which came complete with a number of doors, some of which opened inwards, some opened out, some from the left, some from the right. After a struggle, I reached my room, stepped inside, and had a quick explore.

The room was tiny, as was the bathroom, and the bath itself looked like a horse trough. I pulled the shower curtain aside and noticed that the shower head was missing, and a small plastic pipe protruded from the wall. Wondering how this worked, I turned the dial on the wall, and a single stream of water gurgled from the pipe, splashing noisily into the bath. Muttering to myself, I went to the telephone and called reception.

“Do you know that my room hasn’t got a shower? There’s just a hole in the wall.”

“Ah. Sorry about that. Come back to reception and I’ll give you a different room.” Back along the corridor I went, bags and coffee in hand.

My new room was upstairs, opposite a room seemingly used by the hotel as an office of sorts. As I turned the light on I saw that I had a four poster bed, and the room itself was much bigger than the first. For a few moments I was overjoyed. But what about the shower? I opened the curtain, looked inside, and saw a fairly new shower head connected to mixer taps, the bath below clean, its base covered with small rubbery lumps, probably as a kind of non-slip surface.

I went to the toilet. As I sat there, bathroom door open, I looked into the room and noticed something wedged down the side of a chest of drawers. I walked over, had a look, and saw that it was a disposable razor, obviously dropped by a previous guest and unseen by the cleaner.

As I unpacked my belongings, I opened the wardrobe to hang my suit and shirts. I spotted something at the bottom of the wardrobe and, looking closer, noticed that it was a pop-sock. I considered throwing it away, but a thought crossed my mind: surely the maid would come to clean my room the next day, look inside the bin, see a pop-sock and think “bloke on his own, pop-sock in the bin… transvestite!” I decided to leave it. Another thought crossed my mind: the cleaner enters my room after I have left, checks that I haven’t left anything behind, sees a pop-sock on the wardrobe floor, and thinks “bloke was here on his own, there’s a pop-sock in the wardrobe… transvestite!” As for the option of taking it elsewhere to throw it away, there was the nagging fear of having an accident en-route, the police search me and my car, find a pop-sock and think “bloke on his own, pop-sock in his pocket… transvestite!” It was a Catch-22 pop-sock! I left it in the wardrobe and hoped for the best.

That evening, as I was doing some work, I heard a sudden loud noise, seemingly coming from the bathroom. It sounded as though the shower was on, and so I went to look but found no sign of water anywhere. I opened the door and looked outside, but the sound was definitely coming from my bathroom, specifically from around the bath. I held my hand over the non-slip rubber studs and felt air rushing out of them. It was a Jacuzzi! It had, however, seemingly switched itself on, and upon investigation I saw no visible means of stopping it. A phone call was required, and reception was its target.

“Can I ask a really strange question?” I said.

“Fire away,” said the man.

“Have I got a Jacuzzi?”

“You certainly have.”

“How do I switch it off?”

“The same way that you switched it on – you press the button.”

“Okay. And what if I didn’t actually switch it on, and there’s also no button?”

There was a pause. Then: “I’ll come up.”

All of three seconds later there was a knock at the door, and the manager entered my room. “This sounds really weird,” he said, before entering the bathroom. A few moments later, he emerged. “There’s no button!” he exclaimed. I shook my head. He dashed out of the room. I heard much commotion as he dashed around, before he returned, opened the wardrobe (not seeing the pop-sock) and flicked a switch on a small consumer unit. Instantly the Jacuzzi stopped.

“There you go,” he said, “I’ve switched it off at the fusebox,” and then he left, shaking his head in a confused way.

So, a hidden razor, a haunted Jacuzzi, and a Catch-22 pop-sock. This place has got everything.