We stayed in a hotel once where the door handles fell off the wardrobe, and we laughed about it. It was a cheap hotel and we didn't expect much.
But recently we stayed in quite an expensive hotel in a very old canal-side building.
That first night, we plugged in our phones to charge, turned the lights out and in the morning we saw that our phones had not charged.
Apart from one lone socket by the bed, the writing desk was the only place to charge things.
We told reception the sockets in the desk were not working, and an electrician came and showed how the sockets only worked when the room lights were on.
So at night when we wanted to sleep, the sockets did not work and the phones did not charge.
How crazy is that?
The electrician swapped over the plugs and the leads in the wall behind the desk, explaining that someone must have swapped them at some point.
Now the sockets worked, but that caused a new problem that we discovered when we tried to boil the kettle: It only worked when the room lights were on.
There should have been more sockets but the building was hundreds of years old, so we made allowances and kind of understood it would mean a lot of work to rip out paneling to run new cables.
On the other hand though, it was an expensive hotel, and you would think they could run to installing a couple more sockets.
But, come on - we were on holiday and we weren't going to let a paucity of sockets spoil things, so we laughed about it. But then...
Trash Along The Street By The Canal
The hotel had a long frontage to the canal. And the trash on the street outside was an eyesore. We were paying for a canal view, and we wondered why the management of the hotel didn't see this eyesore.
Why didn't the management clean the stretch by the canal. It was an easy job.
We could see how the trash got there. The trash cans filled up before the Council street cleaners came by. Homeless people opened the trash cans looking for bottles and tins that they could take to shops to get money back on the returns.
And once the trans cans were open, the gulls dragged the trash everywhere and the breeze did the rest.
OK.
But from the amount of trash along the side of the canal, it must have been there for a long time without anyone cleaning it up, or even noticing it.
I told reception that it was not pleasant to look out from our windows to see trash along the canal.
The staff cleaned up the area right next to the trash cans immediately but they left the trash all along the grass next to the canal.
Why would they do that? Why would they not clean up all that trash that had obviously been there a while?
We could only think that years of seeing the trash made them simlpy not see it.
But we chose a canal view for its beauty, and the trash was right in our view.
The trash problem was never resolved, so we did what people do. We blotted the image of the trash from our consciousness as we looked at the canal and the pretty little boats moving up and down.
Then Another Problem
Then water started dripping through a ceiling light in the bathroom from the floor above.
A man came and did something to cure it. We were out when he did the work, and when we did we saw a grille lying in the room because he had forgotten to put it back when he finished. So we called reception and they sent someone to screw it back in place.
The grille was the straw that broke the camel's back. Just a little grille that someone forgot tot put back. But come on, this was a pricey hotel. Very pricey. Get it right - you are charging enough for it.
That's what we thought and we wrote an email to the manager detailing everything. We were expecting a response and we got one - a meeting with the manager and the the bill halved. As I said to her at the time - when a situation cannot be righted, for whatever reason, then money is the only available compensation.
And it seemed that the situation could not be righted because the trash by the canal was still there.
Why didn't it bother the hotel management? After all, they were running an upmarket hotel whose business it was to create a temporary pleasure dome for their guests.
It just shows how impossible it is to get inside someone else's head.