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Meeting Up

Every now and again, I travel for work. Normally, this is a pretty uneventful transaction, though on occasion it can lead to a little bit of hijinx. Apparently, the latest work trip I took was one of these rare exceptions, because it led to not one, but two separate stories. First, there was the story of the scarf that never quite saw any action. This post is the second of those two stories.

The Mild Girlfriend and I had made plans to have dinner with some other folks, so I was trading emails with a bunch of them. However, since I was preoccupied with work, I was a little bit spotty about responding in a timely manner. In order to make sure no one was waiting on me, I let people know that I would be out of town. Specifically, I happened to mention which town I would be in. It wasn't an intentional phrasing, I just nonchalantly mentioned that I'd be in town X so that everyone knew I wouldn't be in town Y during the next few days.

As it turned out, though, one of the folks on that email was also traveling. When he saw that particular email in the chain, he noticed that we would both be in town X at the same time. So, he emailed back and asked how long I would be there. Basically, we tried to coordinate some sort of a meet up in this town. After all, what were the odds? It's not like we'd both told each other about our plans before hand, so this seemed like too much serendipity to pass up.

By sheer coincidence, we were both staying in same hotel chain. At this point, the coincidences were starting to pile up. Were we actually staying in the same hotel at the same time? Well, there was one easy way to check: we asked each other where we were staying. Specifically, he asked which one of the hotels in the chain I was staying at. Was I at the one near the airport? Why, yes, yes I was. It was the one that was twenty minutes away by cab, right? Yup, that was the one.

Well, hell. Now we practically had no choice. If we were staying in the same freaking hotel, we pretty much had to meet up. So, I planned on having lunch with my friend the next day. I emailed him when I got up in the morning, and then followed up with a call to his room. He didn't respond, but I figured he must've been out or in the bathroom or something. About twenty minutes later, he called me on my cell phone, and he suggested I just walk down to his room. I was on the seventh floor and he was on the fifth, so this would take all of about five minutes.

A couple of minutes later, he called and asked a random question, "before you head out, could [he] borrow the rolling chair in [my] room?" I didn't see a rolling chair, so I was very confused. It's not very likely for two rooms to have drastically different decor unless one of the rooms is of vastly different quality (i.e., the suites tend to have more/nicer furniture), but neither of us was staying in that kind of room. This led him to ask what decor I did have in my room, and it became readily apparent that our rooms were very different.

The easiest explanation for that was that we were, in fact, in different hotels. So, we started asking questions about the exact location of our hotels. Sure enough, our suspicions were confirmed. There were TWO hotels from that chain that were about twenty minutes away from the airport. In fact, the hotel where my friend was staying didn't even have a seventh floor; it only went up six stories. So much for serendipity.

What had been a five minute commute on foot turned into something like a ten mile drive. You want to know the worst part? We had only had a small window of time to meet up, and neither of us had a car (we had taken cabs, remember?). Meeting up would've actually been next to impossible given the circumstances. Well, um, I guess we could just meet up for dinner a couple of weeks later, back when we were back home.

Sometimes, having multiple locations of a particular hotel can be a bad thing.

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