Do you guys remember when I went to Death Valley? Amynah
did. Having been intrigued by my ravings about its beauty (a sample of which
are here) she suggested that we take a couple of days over our break to bring ourselves
and our two children to a scrap of desert in which the animals are poisonous so
that they are able to kill you before you’re too dehydrated to be edible.
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| Sana counting flowers on our lunch break in Shoshone: "...seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven.... eight!" |
Given the nighttime temperatures are below zero in the park,
we had no intention of camping out, and so I had to make a reservation in a
hotel across the state border, in Pahrump, Nevada.
The number I called to do so connected me to a
chaotic-sounding call center in what I believe was the Phillipines. The young
woman on the other end of the phone was, as far as I could tell, as new to her
job as she was to speaking English. What she lacked in assurance and
efficiency, she made up for in diligence: booking my room with her took 45
minutes where normally it would have taken five, largely because she repeated
every piece of information at her disposal several times, at arbitrary points
in our conversation.
She asked me to spell my name: “M-A-R-K-R-E-Y-N-O-L-D-S” I
said.
“So that is ‘M’ as in ‘Mike,’ ‘A’ as in ‘Alpha’ ‘R’ as in….”
she would repeat back to me, inform me they had a continental breakfast, and
then ask me my email.
“M-A-R-K-R-E-Y-N-O-L-D-S, the number 3 at etc…” I said.
“So that is ‘M’ as in Mike, 'A' as in 'Alpha'….” she doggedly started again, before repeating
for the third time that there were two beds and a crib. Then she asked me the
name on my credit card.
“M-A-R-K-R-E-Y…..”
“So that is ‘M’ as in ‘Mike’…” she commenced the grim march through the 12 letters of my name, finishing once more with a triumphal flourish of the continental breakfast reminder.
It was a painfully slow process, but I was nonetheless
confident that my reservation had been well and truly taken, and that if nothing else in this fallen world could be counted upon, I could be certain of breakfast. Imagine my surprise, after a long day’s drive and wander around
the more southern wonders of Death Valley, to find on my arrival at the
reservations desk of my hotel that they did not, in fact, have any record of me
for that night.
Given that my careful Filipina friend had checked and
reconfirmed every last detail, this was surprising to say the least. Until the
manager was called in, who reminded me of the one piece of information I had
neither clarified nor had confirmed: my reservation, it turns out, had been
made for December 30, 2012.
From this, I learned two things: it pays to be careful, and
that before I book another hotel I must change my name to Mike.
