Tuesday Night Hotel Club
I arrived back from the client site about half an hour ago. After skipping lunch I'm just about ready to eat my own arms, but have learned from last night – I'm not going near the hotel restaurant for a good half an hour – I want to give the staff a chance to switch.
I just brushed my teeth, and am kind of regretting it already – fresh toothpaste and alcoholic beverages don't really go together. I guess it's better than blasting the serving staff in the hotel restaurant with day old hotel fry-up breath.
I contemplated having yet another shower – mainly to pass the time, but looked in the mirror and thought “nope”. I'm here on my own, I will spend most of the meal sat on my own in the restaurant, and I'll then return to the room to spend the rest of the night sitting on my own. What's the point ? It just crossed my mind that I could order room service and be a total hermit, but the maid appears to have stolen all the paperwork from the desk when she tidied my room up.
I'm tempted to call the maid an idiot, but that would continue the trend of calling somebody or other an idiot every time I travel with work. There's probably a simple explanation. It means I can't order room service though. Arse.
Oh bugger... 20 past. I'm off...
An hour and a half later, and I'm back in the room, living it up. The restaurant was pretty much a carbon copy of last night – except this time I sat somewhere else (I could have sat in the same seat, at the same table, but that might have triggered some kind of Groundhog Day disturbance in the universe, so elected to sit on a two-chair “Billy Nearly No Mates” table at the other end of the restaurant.
The only highlight of the restaurant was a lovely waitress doing the rounds called Chloe. She was perhaps 18 years old, as silly as a box of frogs, but the owner of the most distracting leggings in the hereabouts. I glanced for long enough to know that I shouldn't have been glancing, which coincided with long enough to think “oh my word”. When I left after dinner she charged my card, and we had a conversation about it nearly falling to pieces (it is split along most of it's length). I don't quite know how I didn't burst out laughing...
“I'll try not to break it when I put it in...”
“I'm going to pull it out really carefully”
“I wouldn't want to get the blame for pulling it out and breaking it”
Perhaps the funniest thing – funnier than anything she said – was that she appeared to have no clue quite how funny the words leaving her mouth were. I guess just as the universe needs serious, studious, quiet people, it also needs free spirits like Chloe that balance out the contemplation by opening their mouth and pouring forth comedy gold.
I got a call halfway through dinner from our youngest daughter, who had somehow figured out how to use her Mum's phone while she was busy cooking cupcakes in the kitchen with Miss 11. She had apparently tried to skype me several times, and got no answer. I walked straight into the inquisition.
After a brief conversation while eating a burger one-handed (and getting it everywhere), I raced through the remains of dinner, and wandered back to the room. It turns out Skype works really well on my phone when it's not crashing – well enough to show the kids around the hotel room, and to regale me with stories of a horrible substitute teacher.
I've written too much again, haven't I.
While you're sitting at home reading this in the comfort of your living room, or junk room, or wherever, spare a thought for a slightly dishevelled software developer, who is contemplating walking the hotel hallway to the nearby vending machine barefoot, in order to buy chocolate he doesn't really need.
I wonder how much vending machine chocolate 2 will buy?