10 JULY 2005 MORE RAMADA FOOT-SHOOTING ON THE LAST LEG COCKPIT CONVERSATIONS #76 A Lou Reed mix is playing through the cockpit sound system, which consists of a 12" G4 Powerbook and Harmon Kardon Soundsticks, both running off a powerstrip attached to a hand-sized, cigarette lighter socket 140W converter (the two use just half of the available power at full draw). Due to a loss of cruising altitude, Captain James Duncan is noting that the flaps appear to be sticking. Aware of the loss of height, Captain Nigel Parry changes the conversation to something less painful. Nigel: I'd love to see Lou Reed in concert. Duncan: I did. Nigel: Oh, you whore! Duncan: 6th row. Nigel: You complete whore! Did you pay for the ticket? Duncan: One of the times, but back then tickets were so cheap that it didn't matter. Nigel: One of the times? You absolute whore! Duncan: [Mutley Wheeze Laugh] MORE RAMADA INN FUN! At the end of the driving day, at about 1:30AM, we rolled into Morgantown, West Virginia. At this point, it's time to sleep, so we can pull off the last leg to New York City tomorrow in time to get there before dark. Wary after the last Ramada, which I wrote about in the Good to Go entry, we drive up to the lobby to make a final decision. Above: The Ramada Inn and Conference Center in Morganstown, West Virginia. It looks more upscale than the KY Ramada. We book a room and crash out pretty quickly after wringing poo out of the Roo on some parking lot grass. As in the Louisville, KY, Ramada, the room cleaning staff member knocks on the door at 9:00AM or so, calling "Housekeeping", then bursts in the room despite my yell of "Later, we're still in bed." Roo the Dog runs at the door as it opens, barking, which does the job and dispatches her really quickly. The information in the room says that breakfast is served until 11:00AM on Sunday morning. Just to be safe, following a similar experience at the Louisville Ramada, we arrive downstairs the next morning just before 10:30AM. Despite this, the doorway to the restaurant is locked, even though about 15 people can be seen dining inside. I check my phone, it's not even 10:30AM yet, although it's close. I walk to the reception desk to point this out. They buzz the restaurant kitchen. "Sorry, they are stopping breakfast at 10:30AM these days." "But we were standing outside the restaurant before 10:30." "Didn't the desk staff tell you when you checked in what time breakfast was?" asks one of the staff? "I don't know," I said, "we came in at 1:30AM after a 10 hour road trip." If they had told me that there was a West Virginian zombie attack going on outside and to stay indoors, I probably wouldn't have registered it. "Sorry," comes the response from the staff members, who quickly lose interest and turn away. Exactly the same thing had happened at the Louisville, KY, Ramada, although the staff there were far more apologetic about the breakfast part and they weren't locking us out of the juice bar just because the cooks didn't want to fry up any more sausages. At this point, it's a question of giving corporate HQ a heads-up that all is not well in Ramada Land. I return upstairs and get a copy of the info materials in the room, bring them down to the smarmiest of the desk staff, the only one of whom is still there. I open the materials to the breakfast information, which clearly says breakfast is served until 11AM on Sundays, point to it and ask him what's going on. "I didn't write it," came the response. In a country that has schools that teach something called "American Business Management Science" and has specific courses for the hotel industry, one wonders how any major hotel chain could possibly staff its front desk with someone who accepts no responsibility for false advertising in all of its hotel rooms and who doesn't offer to make it right to any degree? I mean, this is the Ramada, not what Duncan calls the "Super 8 Fuck Shack." When you're traveling across a country as big as the United States and throwing down $75 a night for hotel rooms, you rely on things like breakfast to keep going. It's major enough to be up there in guest dissatisfaction land along with finding a condom wrapped around a turd in your bed from the people who were making the porn movie in your room the night before. I look at him again. "The exact same thing happened in the Louisville, KY, Ramada. What's the point of the Ramada having this useless information in each of its rooms across the country?" Owning a laser printer that can pump out 26 pages a minute, I know it's not really much of a challenge to keep a 150-room hotel's in-room information current when it's delivered in a file folder on regular paper. Or, for that matter, how big a challenge is it to let a guest into the breakfast room after time so at the very least they can grab a croissant and some orange juice? I returned upstairs to get the laptop, came downstairs to ask Brett Jackson what his name was, and spent 10 minutes on a sofa in the lobby filing two complaints, one with the Ramada's head office, the second with the local branch of the Better Business Bureau in West Virginia. After several years of living in passive agressive Minnesota, where people let shit like this slide all the time and then spend the rest of the month bitching about it, it's time to get assertive with errant monkeys. It happened once in an ambiguous manner? Fair enough, I've got better things to do, but in the same hotel chain in two different states on two consecutive nights after $300 or so of room charges? That's an obvious and very easy-to-fix system breakdown, and if there's anything that's going to drive away guests, it's having a receptionist tell them it's not their personal fault that the only information about breakfast that the hotel provides in writing reliably and systematically cheats you out of your breakfast as you book into their hotels across the country. We'll see what the response is. Honestly, it's doing the chain a customer feedback favour. Also, quickly filing the two reports, with two different offices, one external and unrelated, makes the complaint hard to miss, and allows me to let it go, which is the true beauty of non-Minnesotan assertiveness. Up in the room, we had a good laugh at the view out the window, which I immediately termed "the Abu Dis view": If you're just not getting that last reference, check out the Wall information at electronicIntifada.net, found under the Editor's Picks in the top right gray navigation bar. On the road, we're climbing long hills in the van in West Virginia and Pennsylvania in some crazy hot sun. The a/c in the van is off at this point to ensure we don't have a meltdown from the load, the heat, and the hills. Later, passing through Hancock, MD, one of my friends from Lowertown, Saint Paul, rang me this morning to give me the heads up on the temperature in Minnesota, which reached the year's hottest day today. She'd rung the other day when I was in Louisville. "I'm going to keep ringing you, you know", she stated, as if that would be strange. "I hope so!" I told her. Hey, I'm not dying, just moving to New York City. That's exactly what nationwide cellphone plans were made for. THE ROO OF ALL EVIL At a fast food place in Hancock, I finally got the opportunity to get a picture that explains why Roo the Dog is Chief Catering Supervisor on the Monkey Bus flight crew. Roo's breeder Angela has one dog called Anubis, who she swears will let her know which item off the McDonalds menu he wants, not that she's stuffing entire Big Macs down the little guy's throat or anything. I'd seen Dingo, now lost to the ex-wife, do the same with the simpler choice between walks ("outside?") and food ("breakfast?"), leaping up at the air and doing these Flipper the dolphin twitches when you spoke the right one. Angela's drive through experiences reportedly go like this: "What do you want Nubi? Some hamburger?" [dog silence] "McFish?" [dog silence] "Nuggets?" "Woof! Woof!" In Germany, if I remember correctly they trained a border collie to recognise 200 words, the max that humans have taught to any animal, including chimpanzees and dolphins. The dog was so smart that it could deduct new vocabulary from its existing repertoire. If there were ten toys laid out in a room, and the dog (in another room) was asked to find the red bear, it would go and get it from the 10. If the request was for a toy that it didn't know the name of, it would look at the other nine, realise it knew the names of all of those, and choose the unknown one. Dogs are smart creatures which makes them interesting companions -- well, apart from those yappy little furry kick-me terriers, which have no redeeming qualities this side of slippers. As I'm writiing this we're crossing the Delaware River, an hour or so outside of New York City. Soon, the road part of the journey will be ending, but the New York journey will only be beginning. It's exciting to finally make it there. I've been waiting a long time for it. Captain Nigel Parry, writing from the cockpit of the Flying Monkey Airlines Courtesy Bus, 10 July 2005.
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