New Years Eve. We were trying to get some sleep in our very nice hotel so we could wake up at the aforementioned ass-crack of dawn to start our 13 hour drive home. So, you know, we weren’t planning on making it to midnight.
But we hear revelers in the suite next door. This hotel is an old department store. Everything is very solid, and I wasn’t even aware that it was possible to hear much noise from other rooms. Apparently, however, hooting and screaming travel somehow on their own sound continuum and manage to snake their way through wall molecules to my ears.
Mr. Plain just takes out his hearing aids and is off to sleep, the bastard. I mean it is great because he’s going to be doing all the driving the next day, and I know he’ll be rested and not plow us into the side of an IHOP, but really it still pisses me off that he can always fall asleep like turning off a switch. Asshole. But I digress.
This goes on for a while and I keep thinking “Hell, it is new year’s eve. Who am I to complain about a party?” But then I remember how much we’re paying for this room. And I hear people pouring off the elevator. And SCREAMING in the halls. And, no joke, blowing party horns. Who raised these people and then let them out of their cage?
At 11:30 they ratchet it up a notch, make sounds like they are completely rearranging the furniture, flush the toilet approximately every 2 minutes, and scream things I haven’t heard since I used to attend fraternity parties.
Then it happens. They wake up Chip. This pisses me off so much that I finally call the front desk. All they say is “We’ll send someone right up.”
Over the course of the next 10 minutes the noise level drops steadily until I hear… nothing. Absolutely nothing. Silence. Whatever the hotel staff did (tasers, silencers on their pistols, brass knuckles) worked perfectly and I wonder why it took me so long to call. Chip fell back asleep, and all was right in the world.
I rang in 2007 as the only one awake in my room. I smiled at Mr. Plain, rolled over, and fell asleep happy and relaxed. A pretty decent start to the year.
You know I feel your pain. I’m not against the New Year’s Eve revelry, but can’t the revelers take their revelry someplace where they can be sure no one is trying to sleep? Like Times Square?
When you’re in a hotel, or apartment for that matter, don’t hesitate to call. I’m not against parties, all for them actually, but when you’re living in such close quarters you *HAVE* to be respectful of your neighbors, or else you’re just irresponsible scum!
Seriously, if you’re going to have a party in a hotel, be prepared to be thrown out. If you intend to be noisy, you should arrange to have a meeting room, or ballroom. A lot of smaller hotels will give these to you free if you get enough rooms booked.
There’s a time and place for parties, it’s not surrounded by people trying to sleep.
I just don’t understand people who think that it is OK to have a rager in a hotel…
A few years ago my mom and I spent a night in a crappy motel in Arkansas at Prom time. Nothing anyone could do would shut those kids off, the hotel staff even called the cops, still nothing. We never slept the whole night and had to go to a wedding the next day. I still wonder why they didn’t kick those kids out of there, but after they tried to charge us for the local calls to find another motel, my mom hit the roof and refused to pay the bill. She fought with the employees and we eventuallly even got them to hand us fifty bucks to go have breakfast to keep from reporting them to the main chain. Before we left, though, I went through and banged on every one of those kids doors and screamed like a banshee, probably didn’t wake them from their dead drunk stupor, but I felt better.
I’m the same way. Some people cut in front of me in line to get food at an Animal Park last week and I wanted to kill. Truly. Sometimes it’s hard to not sweat stuff especially during the holidays.
you go, buzz kill!
anyone who wakes up MY baby when i have to get up at what you so eloquently call the “ass-crack of dawn” should be prepared for a good old-fashioned skinning, IMO…even if it is new year’s. :) a call to the concierge is practically a gift, i say.
I am a mild mannered person.
Honest.
Please cut me off in traffic, I have no road rage.
Fine, yes, put me on hold so I can listen to bad muzak for 20 minutes while my ear gets all sweaty.
Say you’ll install my cable at 9AM and not show up till 2PM. No prob I put the Stay-At-Home in Stay-At-Home-Mom.
Interrupt my sleep? I’m gonna go Samuel Jackson on your ass, beyotch! Do NOT wake me up! Do NOT drive around my ‘hood in your stereo-with-wheels that was once a car, but you now think is a billboard for your shitty taste in music! I will call the police! I will call your MUTHA if need be!
…I have issues. Many. Many. Issues.
I can’t stop picturing the lady in the rollers boinking. Heh.