Sheraton Philadelphia Downtown Hotel

When you do a Google Maps search for a location by name instead of by address, you get a web search on the left-hand side of the screen adjacent to the map.  In the search, you’ll see a link to the place’s website followed by customer reviews.  The first review for the Sheraton Philadelphia Downtown Hotel, the place where I’m staying, reads, "No in room wifi. Cheap and old."  I can personally attest that all of that is true, and more.

The place is massive, cavernous, and unkempt.  It’s dirty, and the couches in the lobby are starting to fray.  Well, they probably started to fray a decade ago.  There is no complimentary breakfast here.  There is, however, a buffet available, for twenty dollars per person.  I don’t think I could eat twenty dollars worth of breakfast foods in one sitting, even if I purged in the middle.  I know whole families who don’t eat twenty dollars worth of breakfast in a day.

When I settled into my room, I found a pad of paper, but no pen.  I’m not sure how that’s supposed to work.  Either they expect me to write with my own blood or fold up a fleet of paper airplanes to reenact the London Blitz.  There was neither a mini refrigerator nor a safe in there.  So, I can’t have anything either cold or secure.  The in-room internet ran ten dollars a day.  At that rate, I’d expect much more than the roughly three Mbps up and one Mbps down I’m getting here.  I should be able to serve content under load without delays.

The bottles of water in the room were four bucks each.  That’s more than nickel and diming.  There was some discussion about the alleged price of the water bottles in the room among my co-travelers and I.  Two of us claimed that the water cost money, while the third claimed his was complimentary.  Whomever sets up the rooms between guests is obviously a stickler for consistency.

When I took a shower the first morning, I was pleased to find that the tub had a slow drain.  That’s certainly one way to ensure people take short showers, I guess.  After the shower, when I reached for a towel, the first one I grabbed already had a hair on it, one which was particularly curly.  I hope they didn’t charge me for that too.

The most interesting thing I experienced at the Sheraton happened the second night I slept here.  I was awakened around two in the morning by the sound of the air conditioning clicking loudly.  The sound was accompanied by a familiar smell, one which I always seem to misjudge.  It’s either the smell of dust burning off a heater the first time you turn it on during the winter or it’s the smell of insulation burning on a wire: the start of an electrical fire.

Of course, with the digital thermostats they put in hotels, there’s no way to just turn it off.  I tried adjusting the temperature both up and down.  I tried turning off the fan, but my options only seemed to be on or auto.  Eventually the clicking stopped, though I had no idea if it was because of something I did or not.

Since I was already up I decided to go get some ice from the machine and have something to drink.  When I opened the door I saw that the hall was flooded.  There was standing water on top of the carpeting.  The water was either coming out of the room next door or from the wall between the rooms.  I figured I should call down to the desk to report it.  So, I went back in the room to call and noticed that the water was seeping under the wall into my room.  Apparently what I had smelled was the air conditioning unit shorting out.

I called the front desk but, as I should have expected, no one answered.  I went downstairs and let the woman at the desk know what was happening.  She transferred me to another room, so I got to pack all of my stuff up at about two-thirty while the hotel’s “engineer” came up to deal with the problem.  I had no idea if my ten dollars of internet connection followed me to the new room.

I got to my new room, which was on another floor, and checked this one out.  This time, there was both a pad of paper and a pen, which I quickly appropriated.  I figured I’d earned it.  Unlike the last one, this room actually had two bottles of water available: one with the familiar four-dollar price and the other was marked complimentary.   Curious indeed.

So the question remains: do I drink the bottled water and risk being charged for it, or do I enjoy the municipal water of Philadelphia?  I’m probably better off just drinking beer, if only I could understand the inscrutable state liquor laws or even find a state-run liquor store or distributor.