FWIW - I was going to post about something completely different today, but a “conversation about a conversation” reminded me about a particular thing that I couldn’t get out of my head (and that I thought was worth talking about a bit). Many thanks to Xiao Li*, and to* Ben Goldsbury for bringing it back up in my mind…
I travel pretty frequently on business. I’m no globetrotter - I’m not jetsetting around Europe on a conference circuit or anything like that - but I’ve spent my fair share of nights in hotels. It’s funny…there are properties of hotels that make them nice places to stay while simultaneously making them miserable places to stay.
Cleanliness. You want that. When you’re staying in a room where 1,000 other people have stayed, you want it to be clean. At the same time, there’s nothing that quite screams “You’re not At Home!” than a completely-clean “unlived-in” environment. Hotel rooms are similar to ORs in this way. Nobody wants to go under the knife in an operating room where the doctor has spread around dog hair and put out a few tchotchkes “to make you feel more at home”. By the same token, nobody wants to spend the night on a strange bed in a sterilized and refrigerated room, either.
…but I digress.
One of these properties is consistency. When you stay at a hotel, you know more-or-less exactly what you’re getting. You don’t have to worry about whether or not there will be a toilet. Forgot to bring shampoo? They probably have that. And so forth. Man, I could probably do a whole separate post about hotel showers…but instead, let’s talk beds.
Let’s take a look at a fairly typical hotel bed layout:
Four pillows, some weird cylinder thing laid across it…and this is a hotel bed so I assure you, gentle reader, it has been short-sheeted to within an inch of its life. All Standard Procedure; if you stay at any reasonably-okay hotel then something like this is what you’re gonna see. We’re in the realm of consistency - of knowing exactly what you’re getting. When it’s time to get some shuteye, you yank all the sheets up from the bottom of the bed, you jam all the extra pillows you don’t need to the side you’re not sleeping on, you chuck Weird Cylinder into a corner somewhere, and you get your sleep on. No big deal.
…and if you’re staying for more than one night, you do all of this knowing that housekeeping is gonna come along in the morning and reset everything back to the way it was. Again, no big deal.
…but what if housekeeping took you as a person into account and did something a little bit different? I want to share a picture that I took of a bed - it might not have been the same exact bed, but it was a very similar bed - on the second night that I stayed at a particular hotel, after housekeeping had come:
No pile of unnecessary pillows. No weird cylinder thing (seriously, what the fuck that cylinder?). Just one pillow. The one pillow I left there, because I is sleep on one pillow.
No hyperbole at all here: this floored me. My friends…this is a photograph of what Customer Service looks like.
It’s such a small thing - such a tiny detail. Whether it was a hotel policy or just some compassionate housekeeper, someone had the wherewithal to say “Hey, this is how this feller sleeps, so let’s tidy up a bit but let’s also see what we can do about leaving things arranged in the way he had them before.” The bed was still short-sheeted - it’s Federal Law that housekeeping short-sheet beds when they make them - but that didn’t even matter. This one small thing, this tiny detail…this was the thing that made everything a little more “okay”. A little more human. A little more “Hey, y’know, this isn’t so bad after all.”