Things I’ve Lost: Hotel Rooms

I promise this is the last (and the shortest) in this ill-advised series.

Of all the places I’ve misplaced items, none have frustrated me more than hotel rooms. Why? Because they make it next to impossible to recover items. You can never get a person on the telephone, that’s for sure, and they never want to let you into the area where they supposedly keep the items classified neatly by room number. Riffing on that last point—they always seem to want to know your room number. Do they seriously think that we can keep track of that kind of thing?

Not even the Sheraton Old San Juan, where I stayed more than 300 nights in two years and where the valets, bell men, and desk staff greeted me by name, they couldn’t help me. I even left my voicemails in Spanish! All to no avail…

I wonder about the housekeeping headquarters. There are two possibilities:

• An palatial room filled with wondrous wonders. Watches, umbrellas, sneakers, pens, books, toiletries…
• There is no such room. Perhaps they hold things a day or two, but then everything of value is posted on eBay and the rest dropped in the dumpster out back.

The most frustrating thing for me is that on two occasions the valuable thing I lost was my prescription eyeglasses. It isn’t as if they would be immediately useful to someone in housekeeping. I mean, they’re my prescription (which happens to be pretty potent). Of all the things to mysteriously vanish from the trove of goodies hidden in the underbelly of hotels, why my glasses?

Vegas details are coming together nicely. More on that in the next couple of days!

- Normal Guy (Jason Shaffner)