Just in time to save the world of being taken over…

… or how I spent my weekend.

This weekend was the second annual Titanic Open. This is a fencing tournament, hosted by the fencing club I’m a member of, for women and children only (get it). I’d go into greater detail about the whole even itself, but Woody said it quite expertly, and succinctly, here. For my part, I had a great time helping run the event, coaching our fencers in their bouts, and I am very proud of all our fencers who participated. A great showing by all! I tried to take some pictures but none really came out all that well. I’ll post the few that did soon. The most memorable moment, sadly, did not occur at the even itself. No, it’s a moment that occurred at the hotel (and I use the term loosely) I stayed at during the event.

I got myself a room for two nights at the Travelodge near the Greensboro Coliseum. Now, in all honesty, I wasn’t expecting much when I checked in and the first night I got exactly what I expected; a room with free WiFi, a bed, cable TV, and someplace to shower. I was even treated to a nice domestic dispute a few doors down. When you pay less than fifty bucks a night for a room, these are the kinds of things you can expect. What I didn’t count on was returning to the hotel for my second night’s stay to discover they’d given my room away (luckily I’d had the foresight to leave nothing in the room).

They hemmed and hawed for quite a while before I was finally able to show them the confirmation from Expedia, then they gave me a room. I went into the room to find the air conditioner didn’t work. After calling down to the front desk, and then crawling around looking for a reset button under the unit, that was fixed. I note I had to do the crawling around and resetting. After that, I turned my laptop on to discover I was too far away from any usable WAP to get internet service. I called down to the desk to ask if I could get a room closer to the WAP. They told me there were no other rooms available. Resigned to not being able to check my email, I decided to entertain myself with a movie. I turned the TV on to discover the reception was so bad it wasn’t worth watching … reception on a cable television. Anyway, this was the last straw.

I called Expedia to ask them to refund the second night’s room rental and find me a room at a nearby Red Roof Inn. They put me on hold and called the Travelodge to let them know they were checking me out. The Travelodge proceeded to tell Expedia that I had not told them anything was wrong and had not given them a chance to fix the problem. Expedia told me to call the front desk. I told Expedia to hold on the line and walked to the front desk with them listening.

I actually got into a shouting match with the front desk clerk (I should point out that anyone who knows me knows this well outside my usual comfort zone … I’m the kind of guy who won’t send food back even if it’s the completely wrong order). Long story short, Expedia heard the whole thing and, when the front desk clerk learned this, a room magically became available; a room with working TV and AC, and right on top of the WAP.

Apart from the people partying in the room next door untill three AM, who kept jiggling the adjoining room door handle, it was a mostly pleasant night though not a very restful one. At one point I heard them having sex, and sadly it didn’t even sound like good sex; really, if it weren’t for the Titanic Open, the whole weekend would have been a complete bust.

Incidentally, I am NEVER staying in another Travelodge again, and I have advised our club never to put up visiting referees or speakers in a Travelodge (we put up one of the referee’s for the Titanic Open at the same Travelodge … luckily, he wasn’t ass raped by an enormous biker … that wouldn’t have gone over well).

In other news, I’m through with running. It is just hurting my knees way too much. I have, instead, discovered the elliptical machine. This things rocks; it is low impact and I manage to burn considerably more calories in the same amount of time I was spending running. Yes, it’s ellipses for me, all the way.