Saturday, January 26, 2013

Following Directions

Recently, I almost burned down a hotel room and a friend of mine by lighting a fire in the fireplace. The instructions said "light the bag".  So, I did. The room started filling with smoke and the alarms went off. So, I opened the door to let out the smoke and the alarm stopped, but it was too late. The room was full of smoke.

After airing out the room for a bit, I closed the door and smoke started billowing out into the room again. Hmm...the flue is open, what could be wrong? I called the front desk to let them know of my predicament and the question was "did you leave the door open for 5 minutes while you lit the bag?" No. The instructions just say light. the. bag. Why would I do anything else? "Oh well, just leave the door open till it airs out". So...I should leave the door open, in the middle of the night, in the middle of nowhere, because I followed instructions? I did for awhile, but eventually closed the door to keep out potential killers. And bugs. And cold air.

At breakfast the next morning, folks were complaining that they smelled smoke all night and didn't have their fireplace on. (Oops). So, I let the morning front desk staff know that my room smells like the inside of a barbeque pit. They asked "did you leave the door open for five minutes?"  I just looked blankly and said "no, I didn't know to do that cause it wasn't on the instructions. And all night, the room smelled like smoke." The response was "you should have kept the door open".

Why bother with instructions if they are wrong? It's like people who cook a turkey for the first time and don't know you have to remove the bag of stuff from the inside. The only way you would know is if you've done it before or if it's in the instructions.I don't think the folks at Butterball would make you feel as dumb as this hotel staff did. Fail.

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