Modern life presents many challenges: filing electronic tax returns, getting hold of Virgin Media customer services, not drenching the passive-aggressive pedant on the neighbourhood WhatsApp group with digital expletives. But none of that comes even close to the trauma of trying to have a quiet dinner in a modern city-centre hotel room. Every element has been engineered by a disciple of the Marquis de Sade, only one with more spite, and a misunderstanding of ergonomics. Let’s start with the room service menu, which of course now means a QR code. But only if you have a phone signal, which you don’t because the building is a Faraday cage designed to keep out even the slightest waft of 2G. Use the hotel wifi instead, although that means being scraped for every last byte of intimate data you possess and the sweet promise of marketing emails for decades to come. In return for which, it probably won’t work.
But let’s say you get on to the wifi and the QR code does its thing, and the site doesn’t freeze, which it will because it always does. Who knows if the food will arrive? Certainly not the hotel operator. Because the kitchen only takes orders online and no, they can’t put you through and please don’t talk to me like that. Still, after 45 minutes dinner turns up and there’s a green sulphurous ring around the yolk of the over-boiled egg in your Caesar salad, and the over-emulsified dressing looks like it needs a course of antibiotics. But it’s food. Kind of. I wasn’t expecting Le Gavroche.
Where are you going to eat it? On that desk against the wall, so that you can’t watch telly because it’s literally over your head? You could watch something on your phone, but that depends on the data-scraping wifi and, anyway, your phone now needs recharging and there’s only one plug, and it’s over there by the glass-walled bathroom, the one with the toilet with no door. Perhaps sit on the bed with the plate on your lap, so the salad dressing stains the sheets like you’ve had an unfortunate accident. Now turn on the telly: the smart TV, which is smart in the way Reform party candidates are smart. At home when you turn on the TV you get something to watch. Here, you’ll get a screen you cannot escape, telling you your own name, alongside a remote control built like the bridge of the Starship Enterprise only with more buttons. Give up. Enjoy the promotional video for the kind of cheap wedding that ends in lawsuits.
Perhaps you’d like the big light off. Dream on. Hotel room lighting systems are designed by neurotics who got bored with the Rubik’s Cube as a kid and wanted to create a proper puzzle. If you flick that switch by the door, does it make the bedside light go on? Or do you have to turn off the one by the bed, to kill the main light? Perhaps you have to hit them all at the same time, like it’s a game of Twister? Sod it. Just sit under a blazing arc light, with the curtains open because God knows how those work, and no I won’t have a coffee because literally no one knows how to operate those crappy Nespresso-machine knock-offs, and if you do get it to work, the coffee will be a tepid, spluttering stream like something produced by a middle-aged man with prostate issues, and the biscuits are three years old. Yes, I know these are first world problems. But I live in the first world. And sometimes it’s bloody annoying here.
