Entangled With Ivy - next to the last
Are you guys ready for more? Quick recap. In the first Ivy post, we talked about hotel adventures of the past. In post two, we met Ivy. She tried to charge me $1,048 for four nights stay. During post three, I made it to the room to find no working lights in the living/bedroom and no HBO. I called Ivy asking for a work order to fix it all and a wake-up call. I set the alarm and went to bed.
The next morning on my way to work, I found Susan at the front desk. After looking for a work order to fix my room and not finding one, she completed a form for my lights, my TV, and my coffee maker. I actually had a coffee maker. I just needed someplace to plug it in that didn’t involve making coffee on the floor. I didn’t mention the wake-up call.
That evening, I came back to my room for a quick change of clothes before meeting some friends for supper, and there on my desk was a new light. Instead of six lights, I now had seven, and the new one worked. It was a desk lamp and as an added benefit, it had a socket for the coffeemaker. Now, I had a light that worked, and a plug for the coffee maker. To tell you the truth I would have let it go, but at home I was still on an antenna, and we got four TV stations. HBO wasn’t one of them so I really wanted HBO. I had to call. “Ivy, how you doin?”
“Mister Lewis, how are you?”
“I’m good, and I really appreciate the new light.”
“We’re here to please.”
“But, I was really hoping we could get one closer to the bed so I wouldn’t have to get up to turn it off. And how about HBO?”
“They didn’t fix that stuff? I’ll send them up.”
“I’m going to be going out in just a few minutes.”
“It won’t take but a few minutes.”
I changed clothes and sat watching a channel that wasn’t HBO while I waited. I was wondering how long a person should sit before assuming Maintenance wasn’t going to show up. Then there was a knock at the door.
The man was there. The bed had to be taken apart, and the headboard pulled off the wall to get to the sockets behind it for the lights. He got the two lights beside the bed working and was heading for the others when I stopped him. Three lights were plenty. I wanted HBO.
He pointed the remote at the TV and started hitting random combinations of buttons. Eventually he got HBO, but somewhere in the process, the TV’s controls were changed to Spanish.
I didn’t care. I had three lights that worked, power for my coffee maker, and HBO on a TV in Spanish. I was a happy man. Then the phone rang.
It was my lovely wife, Ginger. “Visa called and said we had some unusual activity on our card.”
Little alarm bells went off in my head.
“What are you getting at that hotel for one thousand forty eight dollars that you couldn’t put on your company credit card?”
This seems like a good place to stop. There’s only one installment left Entangled in Ivy - Final Installment. I assure you that Ginger and I worked it out, and we’re still married. That’s why I included her picture above with her mule, Sara. That’s Sara without an h.
Thanks for your comments, your support, and of course your stories. Leave more. I love them.