How about the practice of wrapping the telephone cord around the body of the phone. This is pretty much universal now at the big chains. If you don’t unwrap the cord first, you end up flipping the whole body of the phone over when you lift the receiver.

We could do a whole segment just on phones. Good luck navigating any hotel’s voicemail system, for example, and often the phones are so complicated you need NASA training to figure out how to call the front desk. And then there are those semi-vertical, easel-style phones that sit upright on the desk, with the receiver that just EVER SO DAINTILY fits into the notch. The slightest bump and the thing goes tumbling across the table. Who the hell ever designed such a shitty phone, and why would any hotel ever sign off on equipping its rooms with them?

And don’t get me started on television remotes. It can take twenty minutes just to figure out how to turn the bloody TV on, and navigating the channels is sometimes completely hopeless.

My other pet peeve is being a lefty, all my toiletries are placed on the left side of the sink. So often I come back to find the maid has carefully placed everything to the right. Again this little game of checkers can last for days.

As for the “not letting a stranger touch/move your stuff”; pffft. If you’re worried about something like that you shouldn’t be staying in a hotel anyway. Believe me there’s a lot more you can’t see to be worried about the the stuff you can.

When I got to my room I was pretty startled to see guidebooks advertising the kind of service I had never heard of before – “female escorts” delivered to your room. I knew that Amsterdam was well known for sexual services. But I hadn’t realized that they were so openly publicized, and so readily accessible. Was I ever so glad not to have a kid with me!