No Rest For The Weary

This past weekend, we were in Paris. We arrived very early Friday morning, and since neither one of us got even a wink of sleep on the plane, we decided to take a short nap before we landed face down in a plate of quiche.

Never imagining we would be bothered at 7am, we neglected to put out the "I'm relaxing" sign before we slipped into our jammies. As it turned out, not only should we have put it out, we should have had it flashing in bright, neon-colored lights.

The first knock came just as we were headed for nirvana--the bed. A way-too-chipper-for-7am hotel staffer stood there bearing a complementary fruit plate and bottles of water.

"Welcome," he beamed, and proceeded to set up our treat, making at least thirty trips back and forth for plates, napkins, silverware, moist towelettes, etc.

Somewhere around trip number twenty, I began to think it was too bad they haven't invented some sort of device that he could use to make life easier. Something that maybe had, oh, I don't know, wheels. Yeah, maybe some sort of a wheeled cart that could be rolled into the room, and either left there or quickly and easily unloaded and wheeled back out. Something maybe like that thing in the hall he used to bring all this stuff to our room in the first place. Nah. Crazy idea. It'd never work.

Finally, he was done, and with a cheery wave au revoir, he disappeared and we were left to see who could make it to the bed and fall asleep the fastest.

The last thing I remember is making sure Tim set the alarm, which turned out to be totally unnecessary.

The next thing I remember is hearing Tim say, "Get out!" and prying open one bleary eye to find another member of the hotel staff standing in the bedroom doorway.

"I came for the mini-bar," he was muttering, clearly misinterpreting "Get out" to mean "Please, come in. Don't mind the people in the bed. You just rush right over and check out that mini-bar to see how much damage they were able to do in the whole HOUR they were in the room."

The second "GET OUT!", accompanied by Tim rising from the bed like a grizzly coming out of a really long hibernation, seemed to need no translation. Last we saw of that guy, he was booking it out of the room like he was going for the gold in the 100 meter dash.

This time, we made sure we had the "I'm relaxing" sign firmly placed on the door, and briefly contemplated wedging the couch, the coffee table and the bed under the handle before heading back to sleep.

What we failed to realize though, in our sleep-deprived state, was that we had two doors, one in the sitting room and one in the bedroom. The hotel staff unfortunately realized that they had yet another chance to keep us from getting our beauty sleep though, and right on schedule, one hour later, there was a pounding on the door.

"Bonjour! Make up the room?" a woman who clearly had a death wish called out.

"No! Go away!" Tim responded in a tone that threatened to set back foreign relations a good two hundred years. I guess we won't have to worry about an ambassadorship any time soon.

"I will come back later. OK?"

Yeah, sure. How about in, oh, say, an hour? We wouldn't want to break our pattern here and get more than 40 minutes of sleep at any given time. Hey, maybe you could bring back fruit guy and mini-bar guy, and we could eat all the tiny little bags of chips, drink all the itty-bitty little bottles of vodka, pig out on strawberries and macaroons and then get really crazy and open all the cute little shampoo bottles. Par-T!!!

Once again, we headed wearily back to bed only to have the alarm go off before our heads even hit the pillows. At that point, we were afraid of who might show up next, so we gave up, showered, and headed out without bothering to remove the useless "I'm relaxing" sign.

As we waited for the elevator, it occurred to us that maybe that was our mistake in the first place. Instead of putting the "I'm relaxing" sign on the door, maybe we should have put out the "please make up room" sign instead. It wasn't like we could have had any more people coming into the room. I don't think the hotel staff was that big.