The adders, on the whole, is a placid beast, not much given to anger or annoyance. He sails through life, letting idiots and their actions wash over him, while he goes about his business. Tonight, circumstances have contrived to vex the adders and he is far from happy about it.
That’s quite enough of talking about myself in the third person. That way lies madness or politics, and neither of those appeals to me right now. I’m in the middle of a brief working trip to Scotland. It’s just an overnight thing: go up there, spend a night in a hotel, do an interview, catch a flight back. The usual features writer’s trip, in fact. So far, so good.
The first thing I forgot was the fact that if you fly Easyjet at odd times, you fly surrounded by scum. Easyjet is generally great. Most of the time, it’s a cost efficient way of getting yourself from point A to point B without having to actually touch any of the ground between those two points. Fly during the day, and you fly surrounded by canny, cost-conscious businessmen. Fly late at night, on the other hand, and you fly surrounded by scum.
I don’t like the word “scum”: it’s pejorative and condescending. However, the people who shared the plane with me deserved it. For a start, there were the two geniuses who managed to stop a lift at one floor for the best part of five minutes by repeatedly pressing the button for the floor they were on and swearing when the lift doors didn’t shut. The group of foul-smelling, foul-mouthed Scots gentlemen waiting to board next to me were worthy recipients of the epithet as well.
Still, we got to Scotland in one piece, and I jumped in a cab bound for my hotel. Or, at least, what I thought was going to be my hotel. No, they informed me, there was a problem with the air conditioning in my room (air conditioning? This is Edinburgh, not Florida) and I would have to be transfered to their European hotel, some distance away. Well, possibly. There then followed an amount of confusion as to whether the European Hotel had any rooms to spare for the displaced International Hotel customers. Finally, a taxi was summoned and I made my way to my new hotel, some distance from both the original and tomorrow’s meeting.
I settled into the room, with its suspiciously canine odour, and decided to check my e-mail before bed. Could I get online? Could I hell. Could I get an outside line? Could I hell. I called reception to enquire about this little problem, causing the receptionist to have a panic attack, based on the sounds on the other end of the phone. He squeaked something about getting me another room (errr…aren’t you rather short of those?) and promised to call me back. In the 20 minutes that took, I established the lack of a minibar for immediate whisky-fueled relief and he established that my phone had had outside calls barred for reasons unknown. The phone problem is now fixed, but the whisky issue has yet to be resolved.
However, they have provided me with a rubber duck for my bath. Well, that’s all right then.
The guilty parties here are Apex Hotels. Avoid them.