We’ve stayed at fabulous hotels and occasionally crummy hotels — I’m thinking of those so bad we gave them pet names, like the Malady Inn and (the now shuttered) Edison Warthog, and the Worst Western in the Delta that practically tasered our ears with the fire alarm when ***shower steam*** set it off. Oh yeah, and then this summer at 12 Atlantic Station in Atlanta when we found something in the couch that still makes me shudder.
Mostly, it’s wonderful, though.
But then there was this one time…
…there was the…I don’t know…something like a game of Clue that we took part in unexpectedly at the newish Admiral Hotel, a Hilton Curio Collection, in Mobile.
We checked in uneventfully and went up the elevator to our room.
The first thing we noticed odd was that there was a little bit of trash on the floor of the bedroom, and the pillows didn’t look right — as though someone had reclined on the bed after it was made — see, on the bed that’s closer in this pic?
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So we further inspected what was going on. There was a wet washcloth on the bathroom counter (yeah. I’m gagging right here with you), the tissue paper hasn’t been folded properly, and there’s some other trash in the bin:
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Av calls downstairs to get us another room. The front desk at first tells us that indeed the room shows in their system it’s been cleaned. Av says welllp, it actually hasn’t.
They say that as it’s so late, they don’t have any other rooms in the entire hotel to put us in. Not in the entire hotel? No, sorry.
We tell them that we’ll just go to the lobby so they can send someone up. Av is super nice about all this, but it needs to be fixed. No one stays in a room that hasn’t been cleaned.
They reply that they don’t have any maids at that hour, but they’ll send someone up with linens for the bed.
We talk about maybe all sleeping like cordwood on the bed that was changed, because this is just weird. And there’s still the bathroom. Yuck.
A bellman comes up and I help by starting to take the sheets off the bed. I lift the pillow, and there’s a. Y’all. There’s a ***dirty Kleenex***. I need to shower in a stream of high-concentrate Purell now, with a Lysol chaser. I’m going to study the construction of CDC ebola decontamination stations and handcraft my own. We are leaving.
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Av calls the downstairs and tells them if there are truly no other rooms, we’re finding another hotel right now. Check us out, refund us, we’re done. We’re Audi 5000.
This above, except for the part where we’re completely skeeved out now.
They magically find another room after not having one ten minutes earlier.
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…and considering how disgusting it all was, please accept with the hotel’s compliments breakfast for four.
How weird was all that?
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Speaking of really weird things, last summer we were in Jackson and finally, finally had lunch at Saltine in Fondren.
None of the food was very interesting or very good, so just very quickly, there were these oysters that supposedly had Alabama white sauce, but none that could be detected
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a po’ bao with fried oyster that wasn’t particularly tasty
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and a ‘Nashville hot chicken’ biscuit that wasn’t spicy. So.
We’re almost ready to go, so I leave for the ladies’ room and once my hands are washed, I turn to get a towel, and *can you see where this is going to go wrong*?
It’s so terrible I can only laugh about it. I actually heard a millisecond before the little click for it to depress the aerosol arsenal and as the thought of my tropical-smelling fate came into my head, it was quickly dissipated by a weaponized fog that went into my eyes, my hair, my clothes. There was no time to do some kind of Matrix thing where I arch backwards or cartwheel on out of there.
There was a canister of Glade on automatic, timed sprayer, at eye-level above a place where people would naturally have to stop. What.
Girls of Jackson who have similarly met this fate, I stand in Hawaiian Breeze solidarity (or maybe you got a face full of Clean Linen, which I would have preferred, thanks). Actually, I went to the manager to tell him in the sweetest way why this was a really terrible idea, and maybe because he was overtaken with my aroma, he thought it was a great idea to send out a free key lime pie to our table. Because Margaritaville.
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And I was just wanting to pour myself into a bath. Of, you know, that same high-test Purell as before.
Hahahaha! May you be blessed with catlike reflexes when reckoning with automatic sprayers, and decontamination suits when needed. xoxo!