All the Amenities

I enter my hotel room every night like Inspector Clouseau looking for Cato. It comes to this when you've lived in a hotel room for an extended period. At first you feel charmed, pampered, cosseted. But after a while -- and not even a long while -- all that gives way to uglier emotions: territoriality, defensiveness, suspicion and, ultimately, full-blown paranoia. Your hotel room becomes less a refuge than a bunker, and every time you sortie out the enemy comes in and rearranges all your furniture.

The war between me and housekeeping started small. Every hotel's housekeeping staff has a certain way of doing and arranging things that is chipped into stone tablets somewhere in the basement. They do not take kindly to deviation and, though they will try to indulge you when you're new, after a few days they begin to expect you to get with the program.

The trouble is that you also have a way of arranging things, which includes using the available nooks and surfaces to work and live in. You and housekeeping are toiling in the same room with totally different agendas.

For example, housekeeping wants the desk in my room to be tidy, and in its precise middle they wish to display an elegant pink stationery box. I, on the other hand, wish my laptop to live in that spot, so I moved the stationery box to a handy shelf under the TV. This quirk they mutely acceded to with five-star politeness for about a week. Then one day I came home and there was the stationery box, back on the blotter. I moved it to the shelf. The next night it reappeared. I hid it in a drawer and was rewarded by its continued absence the next day. Two nights later it was back and I hid it in a different drawer. A loaded silence ensued.

Then, three days ago, I came home and found the contents of the desk drawer -- my change, receipts, pens and papers -- piled in the middle of the blotter. In the drawer instead was hotel writing paper, cards and breakfast hangers for the door -- the contents of the stationery box, sans box.

I considered, darkly, and finally locked the paper in my suitcase, defeating Housekeeping by the pyrrhic expedient of appearing to have stolen their stationery. It is not my imagination that they are looking smug these days, the Housekeeping women. I have proven myself the swine they knew me to be when I began screwing with their system. There has been no more stationery; I clearly cannot be trusted with it.

And then there are the slippers. They come in soft cotton bags, wittily staged on the scale in the bathroom. I removed the slippers to the closet with the complimentary bathrobes. (It's not that I don't appreciate the thought, it's just that I'd like to use the scale.) The next night more slippers arrived, neatly bagged and placed on the scale. Next time I weighed myself I moved them to the closet shelf. Do they think I am stealing the slippers, too? I wondered. So I put the bags of slippers out in the open on the bathtub surround. They ignored them and brought two more slippers, posed perfectly on the gleaming scale.

I have 20 slippers now and three weeks to go. I have taken to piling them in the bathtub. Now they think I am crazy as well as a thief.

So far, neither the slippers nor the stationery have appeared on my bill, though I was charged for something cryptically called a "Relief Pak." Upon inquiry I discovered that the contents of the little leather box in my bathroom containing ablutionary amenities are not complimentary and I had been charged 11 pounds 50 pence for availing myself. I assured the girl at the front desk I had no intention of paying $17 for three cotton pads and 4 Q-tips. Smoothly, she removed the charge.

But there was something in her eyes that told me I had not heard the last of the hotel's wrath. When I check out there are going to be 62 pairs of slippers on my bill, mark my words. One way or another, Cato always wins.