Somewhere in Houston, there is a little old man, from some Third World country, running around the city in my underwear!`

Ha … that is how I will always remember my final day at The Hilton Garden Inn near George Bush International Airport.  Someone lifted my stuff!  Despite several calls and visits to the front desk to inform them that I was going to be gone for only a day, and then would return on Sunday to check out, someone jumped the gun.   The housekeeping crew snatched up a few belongings that I left behind — sunscreen, toiletries, food in the fridge and a fresh pair of skivvies for the motorcycle ride back to Fort Worth.

Ha! … I felt so violated:)

What a weird way to end the relationship with my hotel … my “home sweet home” while The Dirty Gig kept me in Houston for three months, as my colleagues and I were engaged to clean up flooding at a computer factory.

I won’t lie.  It had been a stormy relationship between the hotel and me prior to my boxers getting filched.  For 90 days I had thought long and hard about just how fair or unfair it might be to critique the hotel during an unusually long stay.

Every hotel has its shortcomings, and if a guest is there for an extended stay, stuff is gonna happen. In that scenario, you will see more things than an overnight guest.  That’s to be expected.  On the other hand, during a long visit, the guest should see the hotel at their best too.  There are many more opportunities to get it right.  Or you would think.  So maybe it is fair … Here’s what I saw:

Wi-Fi 23.5/7

First off, the Wi-Fi …  The various hotspots worked great around the hotel — the lobby, my room, the laundry, the back of the kitchen and near the pool.  One minor thing.  For ninety days, I had to retype my user name and password to get on … once every 24 hours.  The worst part of that, the hotspot would false start and sputter and misfire, for about 30 minutes, before allowing me to sign back in.  It was like I knew my time was up, but the hotspot hadn’t realized it yet …. leaving me and my laptop in limbo.  Pretty inconvenient

Solely based on the Wi-Fi, Hilton Garden Inn would have scored 6 pings on the 1-7 scale.  However, those were my favorite undies, so … payback … 5 pings.

More observations …

Ups & Downs

There were two elevators … but one was out of commission, for more than a week, a couple of times.  Ha … I think it was out for three or four days before someone hung a computer-generated “Out Of Order” sign on it.  Hmmm … the elevators seemed a bit funky too.  I had to wonder if recent flooding might have left some waste water down in the shafts.

Rise & Shine

I have run up some hotel points in my day, and I learned long ago that pranksters or red-eye travelers often set the room alarm clocks for some weird waking hours. I always check and turn the alarm off, you know, with the advent of the iPhone and its alarm capabilities … Well, strangley, a few weeks into my stay, one morning at 3:30 a.m., the alarm clock sounded off.  Well … I am no detective but pretty sure that points the finger at the cleaning crew.  I remedied this by unplugging the alarm clock and hiding it.  Yes … they did find it and plugged it back in a couple of times, as if to show me whose territory it was.  Finally, they succumbed and left the clock over behind the inn table … or is that end table(?).

Wash ’n’ Wear

Funny thing about hotel guests … when they put their clothes in the washing machine and pump the machine full of quarters, they kind of expect/assume the dryer beside the washer also works.  Or you would think someone would make one of those fancy computer-generated signs to signify the dryer is kaput. Ha! Where’s a guy to dry his undies, assuming no one has taken them yet? … Well, this happened to me.  I had a load of clean, soaking clothes and only eight hours before I needed to wear them to work.  Yes, I thought the hotel should help me out, since I had trusted their equipment for half the job.  Plus, this part of Houston was not a great place for visiting laundromats late in the evening.  So … I went to the front desk and they agreed to let me dry my clothes in the commercial dryer where they dry the hotel towels that don’t get stolen.  It was kind of cool.  A member of the housekeeping staff hadn’t gone home for the day, yet, and she led me and an armful of wet clothes through the restaurant, through the back of the kitchen and to the laundry.  I am sure there were no health code violations as I carried my things through the food preparation area:)  Well … I loaded the bigboy dryer, and started a second load in the public washing machine.  No, I didn’t get that okayed with the housekeeping lady.  And it was quite upsetting to her … You see, she was due to go home, unbeknownst to me and now my second load would need to dry, and make her stay later.  Well … “Ms. Smiley” … I hope I got you some overtime pay.  Sorry that my hygiene inconvenienced you so.  She barked at me to be there when the clothes were dry.  I set the timer on my iPhone accordingly, under her watchful eye … her one good eye.

You’ve Got Mail

So when you receive a letter or a package at a hotel, they let you know right?  Well … “that may be how some hotels do it …,” said the woman at the HGI front desk. That’s the response the first time I complained that I had mail waiting for me, two or three days, without any notice.  After the second or third time this happened, and I complained again at the front desk, one of the clerks pointed to her computer screen and said, “Yes, you have mail.” Thanks.  How very customer-oriented and helpful of you.  Ha … “Any chance you might pass along a heads up to me … you know before i come searching?” She assured me that there should have been a light turned on my room phone.  She was right.  There should have been.  No light ever flickered in the slightest from the landline during my three months in that hotel.  Ha! They even told me they sent a technician who had fixed the faulty phone.  Next time I was expecting a FedEX and went to the front desk.  There it sat.  Mums the word from the front desk.  They did offer to send maintenance to look at the telephone light again.  I passed.

Creature Of Habit

Every day for 90 days, I drove to the hotel during my lunch break to grab a bite and turn on the telly.  For about the first 60 days, the housekeeping crew would clean all other rooms on my floor — possibly every other room in the hotel — and then knock at my door during lunch.  At first, diplomatically, I explained to them that I am in the room every day, from noon until 1 p.m., and that they should consider cleaning the room before 12, or after 1.  This did not sink in for many more weeks.  About the time I went home, the maids seemed to have figured out the drill.  NO! I don’t expect housekeeping to know everyone’s coming and going … by my goodness … after a couple of weeks you would think the pattern was pretty clear … especially with me barking at them after the novelty of the thing had warn off.

Oh What A Tangled Web

I have grown my hair in the past and donated it to Locks Of Love.  I am considering that again.  So, as the scruffy mane gets longer, conditioner is very, very important to me.  Again, I will have to say the housekeepers are just not very observant at the HGI.  You see … I had my own shampoo, but relied on the house-brand conditioner.  That was the only bottle of their stuff I was using. Pretty easy to inventory the situation.  SO … every day the maid would leave more shampoo and more lotion that I was not using … but leave none of the conditioner that I was using — the only thing I was using.  I tried different clues — leaving the spent conditioner bottles in the floor.  I put a sign on the the little toiletries tray, with handprinted C-O-N-D-I-T-I-O-N-E-R written on a napkin.  I toyed with the idea of leaving them floating in the toilet for emphasis … but that would just be mean.   Each day the mountainous stack of free shampoo and lotion grew, like some stone pyramid of the antiquities.  Never was there ample conditioner … and this after I visited their cleaning carts numerous times and carried off handfuls of the stuff.  Is there anything really difficult about paying attention to the guest’s needs if you are working in the hotel industry?  Kind of a basic, right?  You know … the reason you have a job?  This went on for the duration of my stay.  (Yes I am too darn stubborn to just go buy a bottle for my own self … It had become the principle of the thing.)

Checkmate

One of my other least favorite games is hotel room trashcan chess.  The game involves me moving the white trash can 20 spaces closer to the door, resting it by the refrigerator where I use the damn thing.  As a counter strategy in this game, each day the maid would move the trash can 20 paces back toward the hotel room’s work desk.  Yes this game went on for the duration as well.  I thought about explaining to the staff my reason for moving the trash can … “Because I want it there.” But, given their record for attention to my wants and needs, I figured why bother.  The chess matched continued until one player went home.  I considered creating a “landing pad,” outlining the trash can space with duct tape affixed to the carpet in a circle … but after the conditioner sign failed miserably, I thought “why bother?”.

The Card Is Key

In general, I like the idea of hotel rooms using electronic cards to open the hotel room doors.  But, as with any electronic device, there is always the chance for something going haywire.  Funny thing about keycards for hotel doors — they have a sixth sense.  They quit functioning from time to time — usually, according to hotel staff — it is because the guest places the key in their wallet near debit cards and the like, and the magnetic strips effect one another. Well … maybe so … but the weird thing is that the key always quits working when you approach the door with an armload of several grocery bags.  Any other time, the key works stupendously.

Guard The Silver

With all of the other lack of attention to detail in the hotel, it was impressive to note that the room service types kept an eagle eye on wine glasses for the hotel and the restaurant.  Because I am quirky — but don’t drink alcohol — I use wine glasses when I drink water, or juice or milk.  This did not sit well with the person cleaning my room.  Not only did the cleaner take back a wine glass I was using, from the hotel’s stem collection, the cleaner also took a fancy little glass that I purchased from some retail establishment.  Not a big deal, but WHY!?!  I would come “home” at lunch, run out the maid from my room, ask for conditioner, and then retrieve my glassware from the hallway … over and over …  However … as if the total opposite end of the spectrum were represented … when other guests finished room-service meals and left their trays in the hallway … Well, it seems that housekeeping was okay with that.  I counted three days running before anyone hauled off one quite-ripe glass of what appeared to be ceviche, reeking in the hallway.  Ha … it brought to mind my buddy who has actually eaten leftovers left behind in hotels — “hallway buffet” he calls it — perhaps this dish was even too rich for his palate.  I digress …

Who Don’t Like Oreos?

I cannot prove it, but I am pretty sure someone was also eating some of the much-treasured red velvet Oreos I had stashed on the cabinet above my refrigerator.  I thought about soaking some of them in some cleaning product as a joke — maybe the hundreds of bottles of shampoo I wasn’t using … but I didn’t … because you know, I would forget and be the one who ate the soap-laced Oreo.  On the topic of cookies, I did like that point about the HGI … each day they baked and offered up fresh cookies in the lobby.  Some days I got there before they were all gone.

Hand Me A Tissue Tito

The last thought … with all of the details overlooked by the cleaning staff, why in the world is the Kleenex box so important?  Have you noticed this?  Hotels think the Kleenex is so important that rather than replacing an empty box or allowing a box to run low, they stuff replacement tissues into the old box.  Now that’s one big idea in the cutting expenses column!  Check this out if you do an extended stay at a hotel.  Notice that sometimes, the Kleenex popping out of the box in your bathroom are a different color than the tissue deeper in the box.  Someone is stuffing the box.  So that leads me to question, “Is the same person who scrubs the toilet of multiple rooms handling clean tissue and stuffing them into re-used Kleenex boxes?”  I mean … how many pennies does it save to re-stuff Kleenex boxes!?! I bet the same accountant who said “Put a fancy folded edge on the old toilet paper roll, even though there iare only eight squares of TP left on the roll,” also came up with the idea of pinching pennies with Kleenex reloads.  Ha … I have seen the Kleenex reload cost-cutting measure at many hotels, in defense of HGI … my most recent home away from home.  Ha … I pull out the old box when it is empty and smash it, forcing the housekeeper to replace the box and everything.  I deserve Kleenex unsoiled by human hand.  You do too.

Know what I sayin?