I took a day off this past Friday to attend a friend’s wedding up in Arkansas. I worked with him in the past. Also met his now wife, when she was still his girlfriend 2 years ago. A wonderful girl. The plan was for me to get in around 6 in the evening and have dinner with my friends and her family. Of course, in my usual manner, I force my friends and her family to wait for my arrival due to my tardiness. I was very adamant that they go ahead and start without me earlier because I knew I wasn’t going to make it in time. She wouldn’t have it. The reason for this is that she’d been trying to get me to meet her cousin for the better part of a year. She’d been talking up this cousin whenever I got together with them here in Dallas. No offense to her cousin, but I’m always leery when I hear so many enthusiastic things said of a person. I am happy to say that the cousin was as attractive as my friend had stated. Quite tall. Outgoing, too.
Dinner goes it course and we break the evening to head off to rest for what was sure to be a hectic wedding day after. My friends had booked for themselves and me 3 rooms at a chain hotel that’s not altogether a bad place. It just so happened in a weird twist that she had booked the rooms on-line, and she wasn’t there when my friend and I checked in. Since leaving the restaurant, nature started calling quite loudly. I ask the night-manager where the restroom was. She points in some odd general motion towards a stairwell. I look confused, but proceed to find this bathroom in a stairwell. I look and look, and I’m starting to get annoyed because I’m doing the shuffle while looking for this mythical restroom. You all know what the “shuffle” is, so there’s no need for me to explain. If you have no idea, then you’re either not human, or wearing a colostomy bag. I go back and ask again in a more urgent tone and she with a look of annoyance points in a more exact location, which if I hadn’t been so crazed with the yearning to relieve myself would’ve spotted quite easily. That second request for more precise directions probably set in motion the absurdness that was about to ensue.
I go off to the restroom while my friend is talking with the night manager at the counter. I figured that by the time I got back that we’d be all set with keys to our rooms and in bed. No such luck. I get back and my friend is on the phone looking irritated. He was speaking to the soon-to-be significant other. I ask him what’s going on and he explains to me that since his fiancee booked the rooms under her name and her credit card, we couldn’t get the rates that she had booked them unless she was there herself. We had to be charged the full rate. This is the point where everything begins to degenerate. Apparently, before I arrived he handed the night manager his mobile phone so she could speak with the fiancee and so cut himself, the middle-man (literally), out. What happened was that the night manager rolls her eyes at this little gesture. This generally does not improve anyone’s disposition. More so for a man dealing with the stresses of a wedding. So the night manager goes off to call her superior on the phone because he wasn’t physically located at the hotel and get an answer as to what to do about the situation. It was at this point that I arrive. I can hear her talking to the superior in the back room. Eric’s grumbling something into his mobile phone and in the middle of the conversation said, “This is so stupid!” In mid conversation with her superior, she hears “stupid.” Hell at that moment broke loose! The night manager may not be the most exacting in her directions, but her ears are superhuman. She is also overly sensitive along with either a lack of self-esteem or an over developed sense of self-esteem, because what she said after hearing “stupid” was this:
“I’m not stupid, ok? You be careful. I’m an attorney!”
She said that last part about being an attorny three times in the course of the conversation that followed. Seriously! I was incredulous when I heard this. So much so that I just stood there and listened. I couldn’t in this lifetime or any other lifetime imagine that I’d ever hear the phrase “You be careful. I’m an attorney” in THAT context. My friend, stressed as he was already, tries to explain to the Attorney that he meant the hotel policy as stupid and not her. She, apparently, didn’t hear as well when sentences didn’t include “stupid” in them. My friend of course wouldn’t back down. So in the end we left to find lodging elsewhere. BUT! The good of the whole situation is that the phrase, “You be careful. I’m an attorney!” has been found to be quite amusing.