living large

Some people think that if you're taking business trips and living out of a hotel, then you've like hit the big time or something. You check into a room and stay there for weeks at a time. WOOHOO! High-rollin' playa. I used to think that. Then it became a reality for me. The only thing that's posh about hotel living is the fact that you can get out of bed and not do anything about its messyness. You come back from work and the bed is made again. Sweet. Other than that, hotel living kinda sucks. I have to reconfigure my mind to which channel ESPN is on. There's no stereo. And I feel like I'm fighting housekeeping about keeping a glass on the nightstand for water.

There is a strange phenomenon going on with the current hotel though. It's this weird game I'm involuntarily playing with housekeeping: Every day I come back to the hotel and find a new bar of hotel soap, wrapped in this hotel chain's paper, and there's another hotel-sized bottle of shampoo. It's always sitting on the edge of the tub on top of the bathmat, which has been folded in that weird hotel way to emphasize its girth. So I take the soap and shampoo and put it next to the tissue box. As of today I have 6 bars of soap and 5 bottles of shampoo. I can't remember how the numbers diverged, but it doesn't matter.

I can't honestly understand how somebody who takes so much care to fold the towels in such a way as to do the "fannning out in a clamshell shape" day after day wouldn't notice the growing mountain of soap and shampoo next to the tissues. Do they think that I can possibly use a whole bar of soap and an entire bottle of shampoo in one day? Why don't they take them back? I'm really gonna mess with their minds by putting all the stuff back on the edge of the tub when I leave. Apparently these things are invisible to them unless it's on the edge of the tub. Or maybe it's their way of letting me know I've hit the big time.