Hotel, Motel, Holiday Inn

One of the things I most enjoy about my job is the variety of assignments. Since the start of this year, I've been teaching OBIEE to partners, customers and Oracle consultants in Prague, running a five day OWB workshop for a software development house in the UK, doing some customer calls around the South-East and providing some troubleshooting advice on Discoverer and Portal down in the West Country. As most of this work involves being away from home though, one thing you get very used to is staying in hotels, and like the consulting work, where you stay can vary quite a lot.

I start off the year in a rather grand hotel in Prague arranged by Oracle along with the BI masterclass I ran there. The exchange rate in Prague is not too bad and I was able to have a slap-up meal on the second night without worrying too much about running up an enormous bill. Following on from the masterclass though I arrived back in the UK around 11pm, and as I had to be elsewhere in the South-East early the next morning I thought I'd try out the new "Yotel" there, a Japanese capsule-style hotel that's recently opened.

The idea with Yotel is that you rent a room by the hour, you can either go for a coffin-style bunk bed with a flat screen TV at the end, or if you're looking to push the boat out you can hire a deluxe room with a fold-down bed and a bit more room, which is the option I went for. It's quite a good idea actually, if you need to be on a train or flight early the next morning you're just one floor down from the arrivals hall at Gatwick South Terminal, unfortunately for me though it was all a little too strange and I only got an hour or so's sleep.

The thing with me - and this comes and gos - is that I find it really hard to sleep in either a new hotel, or in a hotel room that's got something odd about it - a noisy fan outside, a strange layout or something. The chance of me not sleeping on the first night in such a situation is pretty much the product of this times the importance of me actually turning up the next day, although strangely I never seem to have problems sleeping prior to the Oracle events, perhaps this is because I've never missed one so far and if I did therefore miss one, it'd be the first time - if you know what I mean.

Anyway, after the space-age Yotel experience and the opulence of the Prague hotel, I then spent five nights in a hotel above a pub, which certainly wasn't rustic and was more - and this was my initial thought when I first saw my room - like a B&B. In the end, actually, like most places you got used to it, the staff downstairs were really nice and the pub food - and the Indian Tandoori across the road - was actually pretty good. I can't say I wasn't glad to get home in the end, but it was certainly a change from the previous two venues.

This week I'm staying in another hotel, this time it's a rather grand city centre house down in the South West with a rather genteel restaurant, smart rooms and a nice bar. Again though, last night I couldn't sleep - strange room, important I was on fine form for the client in the morning - but what made it worse was the noise upstairs from the room above me. Around 2am someone came in, creaked about on the floorboards, and then creaked about, I kid you not, for the next five hours right through to 7am. At one point I could swear he was moving his wardrobe right across to the other side of the room, and then his bed back to where the wardrobe was, interspersed with coughing and clearing his throat. Anyway, I must have got around an hour's sleep, and in the morning I asked reception if I could move rooms tonight.

So, I'm in the new room tonight and speaking to my wife on the phone, when I realise, looking across the room, that the window hasn't actually got any curtains in. As this satisfies my "something weird about the room" test - only beaten in my memory by the room I had in a hotel in Dublin where the curtains didn't meet in the middle, and it turned out that none of the curtains met in the middle in any room on that floor - I've finally moved again and I'm now in a mercifully quiet, apparently normal room on the third floor. Hopefully I'm actually in the room above my neighbour last night, if so I'll have to set my alarm for 2am so I can get up and start moving the wardrobe.