Someone Else’s Sheets

I’m in Huntsville, AL this week for a business meeting. The first flight (to Cincinnati) was decent except for the last 20 minutes when I thought I was going to die (insane turbulence that was lifting me off of my seat). The second flight was a piece of cake. I had dinner next door at the Awfu….. ooops, I mean Waffle House, then got some work done before turning in. I pulled back the covers of the bed to find…. cookie crumbs and chocolate smears, and then realized that I was standing on a piece of a cookie (looked like Keebler Fudge Stripes).

I stood there for a moment; very grossed out but not sure what to do. After regaining my composure, I changed back into my street clothes and then headed down the hall to the front desk, not sure whether to ask for new sheets or a new room. But I wasn’t given the choice — she put me in a new room and offered to help me move my stuff.

As we were on our way to the new room, she informed me that I was the fourth “housekeeping problem” of the day. That’s not confidence-inspiring. Inside the new room we pulled back the covers of the bed and carefully inspected the sheets for signs of use, but found none. I decided to check the other bed in the old room and found plenty of hair; nope, that bed never got changed either. So that made me check the other bed in the new room (yes, I know, I’m sadistic) where I found a single hair that I was willing to attribute to the person who had changed the sheets.

The manager left an order for housekeeping to change all of the linens in my new room just to be sure that they are clean. She instructed me to put a pen mark somewhere inconspicuous on each piece so that I could be sure they actually get changed and asked me to call her cell phone to let her know the result.

So, sheets look clean — but are they? That was my struggle. I’ve seen the episodes of Dateline.  I check for bed bugs, sanitize the remote control, don’t use the hotel glasses and put my toothbrush in my suitcase.  So just how do you recover from the horror of finding food in your hotel bed? Can you trust anything to be clean at that point? Are the sheets clean just because they look clean? I sat up until 12:30am pondering these things before I was finally able to get to sleep. On. Hotel. Sheets.

So, what would you do if you got to your hotel room, spread out your stuff, relaxed a bit, and then pulled back your sheets to find cookie crumbs, chocolate smears and a packet of McDonald’s bbq sauce?

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