Welcome to the Hotel Rantifornia

I’ve been traveling with some regularity for some twenty
years now, and there are a couple of things that hotels just can’t seem to get
right, and they’re the simplest things in the world, so I’d like to see some
effort made to fix them. Two simple things and I’ll feel like we’ve made some
progress as a civilization.

First, hotels of America, make your internet access
wireless, truly high-speed and high bandwidth, and free. And by “free,” I mean
stop trying to make it a super-rich profit center, build it into the cost of
every room, and think of it as being as basic as having a bed in the room (and
I’m talking to you, DoubleTree, which recently gave me a room without a bed). Nearly
every traveler  today relies on internet
access, and if you don’t give it to us, we’ll just do it through our phones and
remember that you made it an expensive pain in the ass. Still feel the need to
charge me $10 a night for something I can get free in almost any coffee shop?
Fine, then give me a rebate of the same amount for the cable bill, because you’re
pumping 40 or 50 channels into my room and I never, ever turn the TV on. Then we can
call it even.

Second, and maybe even more important, turning on the lights
should not be like solving a tavern puzzle. Every single hotel room I go into is
set up differently, and it’s annoying every time. Some of the lights (and it’s
impossible to predict which ones) are on a wall switch. Others have a switch
somewhere on the base of the lamp. Some others you’ve got to find the turnkey
in the socket. Some of them have the switch in the cord. This week’s stay, I
had two seemingly identical lamps on either side of the bed. They looked
exactly the same. But one had a switch in the base, and the other one had it up
in the bulb socket. That’s just fucking with me, and you need to cut it out. It’s
insane. If I could get back all the time I’ve lost figuring out how to turn on
lights, added to the time I’ve spent figuring out whether to pull on the paper
towels or wave my hands at the soap dispenser, and I’d have at least an extra couple
of months to tack onto my life. But this shouldn’t be hard. If the switch is
going to be on the base, then it should be on the base of every lamp in the
room. If it’s going to be an inline switch that you then tuck behind the desk
and bed so I can’t find it at all, fine, but do it for every goddamn lamp so I
know what to expect. You want me to clap to turn them on, fine, but can’t they all
be on the clapper? You spend millions laying out these rooms. Some designer reject
from a Bravo reality show spends weeks poring over lamp designs to find just
the right one, and then he or she or whatever says, “Order 400,000 of these desk lamps, but make the switches on every
one of them in a different place.” You’re wasting my life and grinding
civilization to a halt and you need to cut it the fuck out.

You know, I thought I was more annoyed by the internet
thing. Apparently not!