Bad housekeeping
For this year’s Comic-Con, our group was damn lucky to find a place to stay.
Oh, it’s always an ordeal. Which is understandable when you’re bringing more than 150,000 people to San Diego for five days: They all need a place to stay. But this year seemed even harder than usual, with every single hotel on the Comic-Con reservation site booked, including the regrettable hostels (had to pick one of those once; not pleasant), and even every Airbnb within 15 miles booked. The hotel rooms that were available outside the Comic-Con block were either too small for a party of five or too pricey, or both, with rents of $800/night or more.
So, yes, I was giddy when an availability opened up at the Hacienda Best Western in Old Town. We’d stayed there a few times before over the past 36 years and liked it, rooms are relatively large with two queen beds, it has the requisite hot tub, there are good dining options within walking distance, and it’s a short walk off the train line that stops right across from the convention center. I booked it instantly, and we were all delighted at the news.
Every hotel booking you make is an accommodation you’re making based upon your preferences and your budget. So I went into booking this property knowing that it was in no way comparable with the Marriott suites that my fiancée has accustomed me to, or even the smaller Hiltons (such as Garden Inns) that are perfectly suitable, and that while more than $2,000 for four nights at a Best Western might seem extravagant, given the circumstances it was a deal. (My business partner tells me that at Bottle Rock they lay down $800 a night — but she’s running with a different crowd than fanboys pawing through boxes of moldering old comics and abandoned action figures.)
We try to keep the Comic-Con trip as low-rent as possible so that our regulars (sometimes five, but usually six or seven of us) can join in. This means approaching the hotel room like a campsite, like you’re camping out with friends. If there are two beds and five people, welp, two people are going to get beds each night and three people are going to camp out on the floor, with the arrangement shifting night by night. You just make sure you take sleeping bags, or you order extra comforters and pillows, or otherwise figure it out. I’ve been doing this since I was 15 or so, one time sharing a room at a convention in New Jersey with three other comics fans and five actual-to-gosh professional comic book artists in 1977, an experience in which one of the esteemed Filipino artists took the bed of the host without paying anything, while I slept under a table and kicked in, I think, five dollars. Ah, good times. The fact that I’m now 62 should make no difference in this sort of arrangement. In fact, even more than it recreating the sense of being a kid again, and camping out, this arrangement helps you stay young at heart, even if it now comes with bourbon poured neat.
The only downside to this annual scenario is the bathroom. Which I will leave to your imagination. We often bark out requests/demands: “I need to be first in there in the morning to make it to my panel!” or “Oh God! Is he already in the shower? I need to GO!!!!” or “Call housekeeping! We’re out of towels!”
In an age of privation, when so many mourn the decline of reliable customer service whether by airlines that leave you stranded in airless airports, restaurants that slip bogus charges such as “kitchen fees” onto your check, and mobile carriers that now make you accept that they will throttle your speed if you use whatever they deem “too much” of their service, we now come to yet another instance: housekeeping that doesn’t keep house. Under the guise of both the pandemic and “saving the Earth,” the housekeeping at some stayover establishments is even worse than my own at home.
The first two nights, I agreed to sleep on the floor, surrendering one of the beds to my good friend Larry, who is as they say a gentleman and a scholar (specifically of the “Star Trek” universe), who requested it for the first night and then received a boon when I gave it to him for the second night as well. For the third night and fourth nights, it was going to be mine. Other shifting-arounds in the room would take place as well with the remaining queen-size bed and the bonus sofabed, but they were of no import, others having made their own deals. Sleeping on the floor between the two beds like a dog made me feel humble and happy and, I admit, a bit like a martyr (“Look, ye children, upon the sacrifices I will make for friends!”) and, again, took me back to being 15, but with older joints.
Wednesday and Thursday nights, Larry slept in the bed. On Friday morning, I ordered housekeeping. I called the front desk and asked them to please come clean the room, and also asked when I came across housekeeping staff in the walkway outside, and dropped in at the front desk later to remind them. All good. And so when I came back from the Con at some point late-ish on Friday and checked, the beds were made and the bathroom was restocked with towels and what the supermarket politely calls “bath tissue.” Great. I climbed into bed and started reading “Palestine,” a “documentary comic” by Joe Sacco, before finally drifting off to sleep with a new appreciation for the invention of the mattress and box spring.
In the morning after my shower, I brushed my teeth in the little adjoining anteroom so someone else could use the bathroom. There I noticed that the towel hanging there from yesterday, that day of housekeeping, had a little black smudge on it. I recognized it instantly: a bit of eyeliner courtesy of my daughter, who was a member of our party. She shared that she’d used that towel on Thursday. This was now Friday. And I got a sinking feeling. I climbed back into bed just to read for a bit when I felt something in the sheets, grabbed hold of it, and produced a half-eaten cookie.
Dread rising, I said, “Larry, did you eat a cookie in bed two nights ago?”
“Oh. Yeah.”
“Is this it?”
“Looks like it.”
The housekeeping staff had added towels, left in place at least that one used hand towel, and… remade the beds with the same sheets.
With nearly 20 years of adventures together, Larry is a close friend — but sleeping in his soiled sheets? Perhaps too close.
But our friend Paul, a sage who bears two masters degrees in hospitality management, advised us there was one bright side: “Be glad Larry said that was his cookie. If not, it would’ve been from the guests before us.”
August 5th, 2024 at 2:23 am
Picture this: You and your wife go into a Hotel room and find a bit of cigarette ash on the carpet (This was many years ago.) You call the desk and they assure you the problem will be addressed immediately.
You go out for a few hours and when you return, the ash is still there.
Another call to the desk where the clerk assures you the room was vacuumed. You assure him it wasn’t, he asserts that it was, so you ask to speak to the manager, who also insists that the room was swept while you were out.
Eventually the manager actually comes to your room. He sees the ash…
…and blandly says the cleaning lady smokes, and must have dropped the ash on the carpet in the process of vacuuming it!