Bed, knobs and room tricks
Had you asked me last month, I would have happily claimed there was no aspect of hotel life, procedure, guest care, staff care, calamity or disaster I haven't before experienced.
As northern editor of Caterer, responsible for a patch that sometimes feels as if it starts on London's perimeter fence - the M25 - and takes in all the lands from Tolkien's Middle Earth to Tannochbrae, I am a traveller seasoned to the point of vitrification. If I were to enter TV's Mastermind, my chosen specialist subject would be: "Staying in hotels".
Yet I have had a new experience of staying in hotels that surprised me and filled me with admiration for the genius of the person responsible for it. It is worthy of a public airing.
Checked in and the bedroom door closed, I began the ritual exploration of drawers, cupboards, television set and plumbing that we all do, partly to find out where things are, and partly because being in the industry we're just nosey to see how somebody else is doing the job.
Hotel bedroom exploration is great fun, a kind of treasure hunt that mercifully doesn't include Anneka Rice. Hunt the hairdryer is always a good warm-up sprint - is it in the bathroom? Top drawer of the dressing table? Bedside cabinet? Or, as in the case of one hotel I stayed in, on the top shelf of the wardrobe above the eyeline of anyone except a Harlem Globetrotter?
Understanding the TV zapper is another good bedroom conundrum. Every one is different, all have twice as many buttons as you need, and none have intelligible instructions. Try to remember how many times you have got so frustrated with the zapper that your fingers end up racing up and down the keyboard like Beethoven in a bad temper. Then you realise the guest before you has nicked the batteries.
Another of my favourite hotel bedroom games is working out the combination for unlocking the bedclothes from underneath the mattress. If you can't solve this one, there is no way you are ever going to get into bed, and if you were so foolish as to squeeze between gridlocked bedclothes, you would wake the next morning flat as a cardboard cut-out.
Essential preliminary bedroom exploration has to include working out the light switch combinations. Between the entrance switch, bathroom switch, bedside switch and desk switch are more permutations than the winning Lottery numbers.
The trick, as all seasoned travellers will know, is once the decision to sleep has been reached, never turn any switch on. Better to stumble in the blackness and stub toes on furniture than risk trying to work out how to get every light off once you are back in bed. It also stops the damned bathroom extractor fan from whirring away for half an hour at four in the morning.
But back to that special new experience. About 20 minutes after checking in, the phone in the bedroom rang.
"Hello?"
"Reception, here. Hope you've settled in and the room is comfortable - is there anything you can't find?"
The voice was not only warm, but seemed to have a mischievous chuckle in it, as if the receptionist knew I'd been in the room just long enough to have done the first round of inspection and was bound to have come across at least one puzzle.
It was also a bit unnerving. Was there a hidden camera, a two-way mirror, sound-bugs? Was there a group of staff standing around a monitor howling with laughter at my antics to find out where everything was?
None of those things. Here was a clever idea and some great staff training. In the event, I had completed all exploration missions successfully. All key installations had been identified and understood. Nothing unresolved to report. Which may have proven another aspect of this hotel - whoever designed the rooms has obviously stayed in a lot of hotels.
