Would you like sheets, a pillow and a blanket with that?

Knowing that our flight was scheduled to arrive in Dallas at 11:30pm with a 45 minute drive on top of that, I called the hotel a day in advance to confirm our reservation and inform them of our late arrival. The hotel "system was down", but somehow, our room information was already printed out. I need to hire the guy who, knowing that the system will be down, prints out all of the information he needs in advance. The hotel turns out to be at capacity, "we're giving you a room that may only have 1 bed, check it out and if it does, we'll send another bed up. Having only 1 bed wasn't the only thing about the room, it was a smoking room and nicely equipped for the handicapped. Those comfy beds that had been awaiting us (or that we'd been awaiting), turned out to be less than comfy and technically, I didn't even have a bed yet. Oh, and it's 1:30am at this point.

After 15 minutes my bed arrived. Of course, at that hour of the morning, hotels are operating on a skelton staff. The guy who dropped off the bed didn't appear to have ever done this before. He looked at me as if I was supposed to know where the bed would best fit in the layout of the room, not that it's a technical thing. Once we had the bed situated he looked at me and asked, "Would you like sheets, a pillow and a blanket with that?"

The bed accessories were dropped off another 15 minutes later. They provided me with a Queen-sized sheet for a twin bed! The night couldn't pass quick enough. Fortunately, we were transferred to a nicely accomidated room in the morning and enjoyed a nice stay the remaining three nights of our trip. In exchange for the inconvinience the hotel credited us a night's stay on their tab. Fortunately, while a memorable shared experience with Tim, the content of the conference outweighed the interruption of our travels. I'll get into what I took away from the conference in the coming posts...