Tarkblog

Greetings from Novi, Michigan

More appropriately, greeting from the “Crown Plaza Holiday Inn formerly known as the Doubletree Hotel”. This is how the front desk addresses the name of their hotel, so I thought I should do the same.

As you can tell, the hotel is changing names. As it changes names, it seems to also be changing everything else. Tonight, for example, when we got back from the showplace the front carpet area had been converted into a tile floor. Not a temporary conversion mind you - the tile guys were actively ripping up carpet and putting down tile.

My journey here began around 3pm on Monday when, after a 10:30 arrival to the showplace center and spending a few hours setting our stand up, we came to the hotel to drop off our stuff. I got checked in and was assigned a room at the opposite corner of the hotel than the front desk. Luckily it was an indoor walk, though it was a bit rough because the mason/concrete company that was doing some kind of renovation in the center courtyard had equipment and fake carpet all strewn throughout the hallway leading to my room.

Upon arrival, my key didn’t work. They gave me two keys, so I tried the other, and it didn’t work either. The door flashed both green (which is normally good) and red, which doesn’t seem so good.

I hoofed back to the front desk (with both a suitcase and a laptop in tow) and was immediately issued another set of keys.

Back to the room - no dice.

Back to the front desk. They sternly reminded me to “not put the keys next to my cell phone since it might demagnitize it”. I sternly told them that I held the keys in my hand the whole time I walked to the room and back, and my phone was in my laptop bag no where near my hand. They were going to send me back with another set, but I told them they were going to send me back with a maintenance guy. He happened to be close by, though he had to go track his “master key” down from Jose. That didn’t make me feel all that secure.

Back at the room again, and the master key didn’t work either. According to the maintenance guy, the “battery was dead”. I’m unsure how dead batteries can still allow lights to work, but whatever. He told me to wait “a few seconds” and he would be back to change the battery.

About 10 minutes later another guy shows up with a key and the same thing happens again. This guy proceeds to tell me that red+green means the door has to be reprogrammed and it would take some time. At this point I was tired of waiting, and the rest of my party was ready to go back to the booth at the showplace, so I threw my stuff in another guy’s room and we left.

Around 6:30 we came back to the hotel. I got my stuff and proceeded back to my room. Again, the door didn’t work. So I hoofed it all the way back to the front again. They told me that the door was officially broken, so they were switching me rooms. The new keys they gave me worked the first time.

Luckily, I got upgraded. I assume it’s because they didn’t have any of the normal rooms left. My room isn’t much better than the standard room that my colleagues have, but I have a king bed, a couch, and a small desk to work at. I also have a wired internet connection; nobody else is able to get the hotel’s free wireless to work from their rooms.

At this point I’d normally leave sleeping dogs lie, but there are so many things wrong with this place I had to point them all out:

* The tub part of my tub/shower doesn’t completely turn off, meaning it’s an endless source of running water sounds when trying to sleep at night. I just throw towels in it to try and muffle the sound.

* There is no way to plug the drain in the tub/shower, so I’m not quite sure what the point of having water running out of the tub is. In fact, there isn’t really any way to sit down in the thing unless you’re less than 3 feet tall or happen to like putting your feet behind your head when bathing.

* One of the towel hangy bars in the shower is missing, leaving two big open holes in the fiberglass in which water runs/splashes when the thing is on. I can’t imagine this is good for the wall and other stuff behind the fixtures.

* The hotel provides glass coffee mugs in the bathroom next to the small coffee maker. However, they don’t rest them on any type of sanitary cloth or piece of paper, so when the sink runs the water runs over and floods the area by the cups, making nasty colored rings on around the part where you put your lips.

* It is unpossible to sit on the toilet and close the door to the bathroom. You either have to walk in and stand in a slightly uncomfortable position between the toilet and tub to close the door, or simply go with the door open. The latter isn’t a problem in a private room, except across the hallway is the closet with a mirror on the door, so you have to face yourself in the mirror during private business time.

* For some reason, the pool and hottub are closed. They are in a courtyard area off the lobby and are 100% viewable and accessible, but the small gate surrounding them is locked. No sign is posted as to why I cannot go sit in the hottub.

* The side door the hotel, near where we park, does not lock. It has a card scanner that is supposed to only allow access to hotel patrons, but the lock mechanism looks to be broken.

* The fire alarm went off yesterday evening when we were leaving for dinner. The maintenance staff acted pretty quickly to start figuring out what to do, but they basically said that it most likely wasn’t a fire since the thing was going off all of the time anymore.

* The first night I touched “5 2″ to get a wakeup call. it connected me to the front desk (which strangely is extension “5 1″). I was put on hold and after 5 minutes gave up.

* The alarm clocks provided in the room are somewhat new and trendy, and almost impossible to figure out. Namely, the bold “Alarm OFF” button on the front of the unit, which is in a completely random spot, is not visible when the room is dark. So, the only recourse is to hit snooze, turn the light on, then hit the “Alarm off” button. Also of interest: If the alarm is off, hitting the “alarm off” button will turn it on.

* The deadbolt lock on my room door works fine, but the small moving bar lock thing that all hotel doors seem to have is completely broken.

* The room heater is always on. The fan runs continuously (and I can’t find a way to turn that off without turning the whole unit off). When the heater portion kicks on, it sounds a lot like someone started making a smoothie in a big blender. Last night got a bit frigid, since I prefer to sleep in a cold peace than a warm pandemonium.

* The informational channel on the TV that comes on everything the set turns on repeats a short spiel every 30 seconds. Amongst other things, it says to be sure to stop by the front desk for one of “our work famous chocolate chip cookies”. No such cookies are available at the front desk.

* One of my colleagues has now gone through 3 sets of 2 room keys. The maintenance guy says that she just has a lot of dust (from all of the renovation work) trapped in the key reader and it’s messing up the keys. This is a bullet point in itself, but it gets better:

* Everytime she has gone to the front desk to get a new set of keys, she simply tells them what room number she’s in and they issue her a new set. No questions asked. And both times she’s been up there, a different person was working.

* At one point we needed to call another co-worker, but we didn’t remember his room number. The guy at the front desk just told us what room he was in.

* As a followup to the above, we thought we knew the room said co-worker was in before we called him, so we knocked on his door. The guy actually staying in that room got quite irate. This isn’t the hotel’s fault, but it certainly was amusing.

* The exercise facility consists of: a stationary bike, a treadmill, and a stairclimber in a small dimly lit room. Imagine if you will a completely booked ~200 room hotel near a conference center hosting a 6000+ person conference full of business people. On Wednesday I happened to stumble in just as someone was getting off the bike. This morning, nothing. Tomorrow morning I’m not even going to try.

* As I type this I just started to notice ants crawling on the wall and desk. I hope they’re not smart enough to find my warm body in the bed on other side of the room.

* For the geeks out there: The DHCP provided by the hotel’s internet connection doesn’t pass out nameserver information, so using name based things like “tarkblog.org” doesn’t work. I have to go in and manually set the nameserver. It’s possible this is intentional so that they can route you to some kind of page that makes you pay for using the service, as the first few times I’ve used it I’ve been redirected to a webpage that doesn’t load properly. But after setting the nameserver I’m able to completely use the web like I’m at home/work.

However, my point in all of this is that your normal non-technical user would never have figured this out.

* The one saving grace of the hotel has been breakfast. The buffet is really good, inexpensive as far as breakfast buffets go, and the wait staff is really good. Also, they have huge fresh ripe strawberries that are just awesome. Where they get them in the middle of October is beyond me, but I’ll gladly eat them.

That’s all I got about the hotel. I’ll probably blog a blog about the convention once I’m settled back at home. I’m not looking forward to tearing down our stand tomorrow, followed by 3 hours of packing the truck, followed by 5+ hours in the truck on the way home. Wish me luck.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 26th, 2006 at 7:07 pm and is filed under Random Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.