Jeff's Conspicuous Lack of Hotel

Email received recently from Jeff, edited only for spelling and clarity:

Last week my house was missed by the wildfires "thanks to the giant firebreak in my backyard" [ed: the golf course finally served a purpose!]. Kim in inside sales called me sick in the head for not worrying about it. I could only tell her, "It's insured, and there weren't any people or any of my possessions in it, so why should I be worried? This will be great for the rental market!" That comment didn't help Kim's sense of my mental health.

Now I am in New Orleans for the Coast Guard Innovation Expo. Its like CES for people who are trying to take advantage of the fact that the Department of Homeland Security has no idea how to spend money effectively.

Last night we got in late, like 11:00 pm, to the hotel room. We are staying in a part of New Orleans with a conspicuous lack of restaurants open after 11:00 pm. So, we had to hunt around for an hour to find a place that was open. I ended up getting a really spicy chicken sandwich (yummy food, bad choice for a guy trying to go to sleep) at FuddRuckers. Nice name, asshole.

When I finally get back to the hotel room, the floor we are on is already populated by whooping and hollering drunken hillbillies. They continued to whoop and holler until well after 3:00 am. This is the only time in history that I have ever called security on someone who was having fun. I have to be up at 6:00 am to get ready for the show and these fuddruckers are whooping and hollering in an expensive hotel across from the convention center at 3:00 am Sunday night before a big show. I am talking the kind of whooping and hollering usually reserved for a strip club when some poor kid on his 18th birthday on stage simultaneously getting an atomic wedgie and three pairs of very nice tits rubbed in his face. And I had to try and break it up. This is already turning out to be a trip from hell. Fortunately for the fuddruckers next door, the hotel has a conspicuous lack of security personnel who are willing to do anything about it unless there is physical damage being done to hotel property.

I woke up this morning to take a shower. The first thing I noticed is that all of the towels were stored INSIDE of the shower. Who's bright idea was that? Please, mr. owner of W hotel, next time you have a bright idea try running it by a first grader to see if it has any fatal flaws that you might be missing. So I went to take the towels out of the shower, and noticed a conspicuous lack of anywhere to hang a towel, wet or dry (or my toiletry bag), in the bathroom. So the towels stayed in the shower. Then I turned on the shower, and it only has two modes: off, and supersonic. It's the kind of shower that blasts the top layer of skin off of your fuddrucker. After the water is done torturing your body, it instantly deflects upward toward the towel rack. It blasts so hard and fast that it creates an updraft that catches the shower curtain, forcing you to either huddle in a corner of the shower (presumably afraid of someone else's fuddruckers lurking on the shower curtain) or be forced to wrestle hopelessly with the curtain for legroom. I have to warn you here that no matter how hard you fight the shower curtain, it will always fly back up. There was a conspicuous lack of magnets or weights at the bottom of the shower curtain. [ed: GD Bernoulli effect!]

Then I went to iron my clothes for the show. I like to iron my clothes while drinking coffee. There was a conspicuous lack of a coffee maker in the room, and a conspicuous lack of a place to plug in the iron anywhere close to a place with enough floor space to stand the Ironing board. I should let you know that there was also a conspicuous lack of wireless internet (only a plug-type with a plug that is conspicuously too short to reach my Ethernet port on the left side of my computer. The provided cable is on the right side of the desk). There is also a conspicuous lack of a plug anywhere near the desk for charging my laptop, phone, and whathaveyou. I have to go now to give a wake-up call to the fuddruckers.

"Good morning, sir. this is your 6:30 wake up call"

"I didn't order a wakeup call"

"Thats funny, I didn't order you whooping and hollering all night long, and not even stopping after security came by your door to ask you to quiet down."

Sincerely,

Jeff Demattos

Applications Engineer