...

IT'S 3:30 A.M. I'M SLOUCHED AGAINST THE HOTEL'S front desk, bleary-eyed. My chauffeur is waiting in the car. "Any vacancies?" I ask the night clerk.
"Sorry, no. We're filled up," he says. " And so are the next three hotels down the road--I was sending people over to them."
"Oh," I groan. "You're kidding..."
"There are more places you can try." He pauses. "They're farther away...and might be full, too."
I'm just standing there. I'm pondering my options. I don't wish to carry bad news to my chauffeur. I laugh in a doomed kind of way. "I told my husband I'd even sleep on dirty sheets."

Suddenly the night clerk looks up with raised eyebrows. "Well," he says, and his voice has a hopeful ring. "We do have one room where a businessman had an early flight out. I don't know if it's been cleaned. I can give it to you cheap." Before he's done talking, I've yes-yes-oh-yes, absolutely claimed it.
"Let's go have a look," says he.


That's how I ended up playing chambermaid at 3:45 in the morning, cleaning up after a single businessperson who managed to mangle the bed covers on a king-sized bed, over-stuff the trashcan and leave behind his slippers from an Asian hotel.







The night clerk brought us clean sheets and emptied the trash. He brought us an armload of shampoo and conditioner. Perhaps he was thinking: fewer hours in the bed, more stuff for the head.





At any rate,
we got a cool deal on a very hot night!






...