Take My Room, Please

In Atlanta, I arrived to find one nonsmoking room left, and a big, bold, gold plaque on the door announced THIS IS A NONSMOKING ROOM. Not only did the room reek of cigarette smoke, but the bathroom sink didn't drain. I went to write down a restaurant phone number; the pen, like a story babbled by a 2-year-old, was pointless.

Between the stink and the sink, I asked for a new room and was told the hotel was completely filled. They sent up a man with a spray bottle of Febreze instead.

Back from dinner, I asked if any rooms had opened up, but I already knew the answer. Up came the same shlepper with the Febreze. Another gent unclogged the sink. I went to bed figuring that even with my karma, for one night it was livable.

I was wrong. At 5 a.m., I got up and put my feet down into a mush of soaking wet, cold carpet. I grasped with panic that I'd never be able to get dressed there for the half-day program I was about to co-present to a roomful of executives.

There was no FEMA icon button on the phone next to Messages and Room Service, so I pressed Front Desk. The clerk explained the situation: The man in the room above mine had gone to sleep without realizing his toilet was overflowing. It was now hours later, and my second-floor room was flooded along with tiles on the hotel's ground-floor ceiling. That's when I started yelling.

Somehow, miraculously, a new room appeared where at 10 p.m. there was none. They moved me to the Club floor at 6:15 a.m., just in time to get dressed.

Nobody has this many seriously stupid hotel rooms without being tempted to tease karma and leave unused towels on the floor, refill the Evian bottles with tap, and complain that the mini-bar is missing the roasted almonds you just snacked on. But I'll never do any of it. Because I cannot deal with the concept that I might have to go through this again in another life. As it is, in this one, I'm darn close to making the bed before I check out.

Pam Janis is a Washington writer.