...and another thing...

Some notes to the Lakeland Holiday Inn and Convention Center regarding service, and how to give it.

First, it's probably not a good thing that your front desk staff, your front line, the first people that any guest comes into contact with, know absolutely nothing about your hotel. Here is a sampling of conversations with a variety of your staff:

ME: Will the bar be open later tonight?
CLERK: Yup. Well, I mean they close at 10.
ME: That's not late enough. I won't be back 'til 11
CLERK: Oh. Well, they'll be open. But not for food. Maybe.
(They were NOT open)
**************************
ME: Do you have an ATM in the hotel?
CLERK: (screaming into an office behind her) DO WE HAVE AN ATM?
DISEMBODIED VOICE: no
CLERK:(to me) No.
ME: Thank you so much for your help.
********************************
CHRISTY: I need quarters for the laundry.
CLERK: I can only give you three dollars worth. Is that enough?
CHRISTY: Um.....it's $1.50 for the wash and $1.50 for the dryer and $1.25 for soap.
CLERK: So, you need more than three dollars?

Though cleaning a hotel room isn't a difficult job, it would seem that attending to the details is. It's bad enough that I have to drink my wine from a plastic cup. The insult is amplified when the maid removes the dirty cups without replacing them with clean ones. Oh, and that ice cold cup of coffee still sitting on the coffee maker in mid afternoon, .....probably not going to drink that.....it's o.k to remove it.

You also need to pay attention to your machines. The ice machine on my floor is a Jerry Lewis movie come to life. When the button is pushed, it begins to grind, and whir, and clunk and chug, and rattle and shake and eventually, after 10 or 20 seconds, four or five tiny cubes are regurgitated into the waiting bucket. To obtain enough ice for one or two drinks requires a whole lot more grinding, whirring, clunking, chugging, rattling and shaking. Then there is the clothes dryer. I was told that one full cycle (costing $1.25) wasn't enough to dry the clothes, but I didn't believe it. So, tie me up and call me an unbeliever. After a full 30 minutes on a setting called "extreme high heat", my mixed load was still damp enough to wipe my face with.

I won't even begin to discuss the heinous crimes wrought by your "restaurant", not the least of which is the edible-oil spray-on-cheese dressing the nachos. The horror stories told to me by the cast about the food coming out of this establishment would rival any episode of "Haunted Places".

But the weather was nice.