Where Have All the Outlets Gone?

Have you tried to find an electrical outlet in a hotel room lately? Available, reachable outlets are as rare as a Red Sox jersey at Yankee Stadium. That's true even in recently renovated rooms, unfortunately. What are hoteliers thinking? Clearly they're not. Travelers these days want to plug in, log on, tune in and chime in, even when they're traveling on a so-called pleasure trip. So make it easy for us, already!

I admit it: I'm a laptop addict. I don't have a BlackBerry or a Treo. Probably will within a few months but even when I get one, my laptop has abilities that BlackBerries/Treos don't. Laptops hold a LOT of information. Laptops allow for full-size viewing. Laptops let you download, view, change and update information on documents you need to view BIG, such as PowerPoint, Excel and many Word docs. On a recent trip, a friend with a BlackBerry e-mailed an Excel doc to me. He needed to see it and edit it for a meeting the next morning. I downloaded it onto my laptop, he made changes for an hour, and I e-mailed it back to him. The point is, laptops aren't going away any time soon, even with the smaller devices. So make it easy for us to use them in your hotel rooms!

The gyrations I have had to go through to plug in my laptop would be laughable if they weren't so annoying. I've twisted around like a giant pretzel or crawled along the floor like a bug, or both, reaching behind, under and sometimes through desks, beds and other furniture. I've moved desks, nightstands, couches, heavy chairs and giant lamps to get to an outlet. That's not customer-friendly!

And try finding one in a hotel room anywhere near the bed. I have a wireless broadband card (wouldn't leave home without it) so I can be on the Web while sitting on the bed with my feet up and a bunch of pillows behind my back, usually while watching tv. As I write this, I am on a trip and am plugged in to an outlet at the desk, while listening to "The View" on tv. I can't watch it because the tv doesn't swivel around enough to be viewed when I'm at the desk. That's the case in many hotel rooms. Of course, I could work with my battery but most times I work longer than my battery's capability. The outlets by the beds are unreachable and unavailable. One's behind the bed in the middle where I can't reach it (as most are, especially if the bed is king-sized). Another is behind one nightstand but those two outlets are already taken up by the lamp and the clock. Along the walls there are none. There never are. I think the game is, how many walls can we put into a hotel room with no outlets. I see this over and over in all brands and levels of hotels. Aggravating!

Here at the desk, there are four unused outlets, two on the wall and two on the lamp. That's a good start. But we need them also by the beds so we can easily reach to answer our cell phone while it's recharging, and preferably both of us can if there are two of us. We need to be comfortable while working on our laptops, even if we're not on the Web. Both of us at the same time! I have an extra long power cord (which I guard with my life) so I can sometimes find a plug close enough so it'll barely stretch, but then someone else or I risk tripping over it.

So help us out, hoteliers! Even if you can't give us the outlets we need where we need them, give us the option of power strips that are long enough to accommodate our stuff. I've seen exactly one of those in my last 25 hotel stays. I take so many chargers and power cords with me on trips that I sometimes wonder how the airport screeners let me go through with all of the tangled cords in my carry-on. Why do they let me through? Because there are a lot of us who travel with five or more power cords for our various devices. So hoteliers, give us more places to plug them in!

Cut Off!

My cable television and high-speed Internet connection are both out. Must be a fairly wide and serious outage because it's been 4-1/2 hours since my cable tv got stuck on one sound, which I thought at the time was just an irritatingly bad musical group on "The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson." It was late anyway so I slammed off the tv, rolled over and went to sleep. But shortly before 6:00 a.m. I turned on the tv again to see what had happened in the world in the last few hours and got a black screen.

That woke me up!

I tried my kitchen tv. Got the "Early Today" full-screen logo on that tv.

Comcast's local customer service phone line is by turns saying "All circuits are busy" and "Due to a high volume of calls, we are unable to connect your call at this time; please call back later." So they definitely know there's a problem.

So how am I connecting to the Web? Good old Verizon broadband card. I believe in back-ups.

God, it's quiet. I'm used to tv aiding my insomnia. I usually have early-morning tv's going in my bedroom and the kitchen before the sun comes up. I pad back and forth between the maybe-something-in-the-refrigerator-will-help-me-get-back-to-sleep and the let's-try-the-bed-one-more-time. The chatter of the too-bright-and-feaux-witty tv personalities usually distract and calm my racing mind and allow me to get a few more winks before my day has to begin. Insomnia is such fun -- I can tell you what's on every major tv channel between midnight and 6:00 a.m.

Ah, better. I just went to the Web site of my favorite local country music station, WPOC 93.1 in Baltimore, and am listening live. Ugh -- Johnny Cash's "Ring of Fire" greeted me first. I prefer the new country in the morning, not the stuff from three decades ago. So at least I know that the world is pretty much as it was last night.

Well, eventually they'll get the cable fixed. Until then, I feel kind of disrupted. I hate being cut off. Even if it's bad news, if something's happening, I want to know.