This is a special entry tonight for those who like to revel in the misery of others. Well, you lot can have a bloody good laugh at the predicament I’m in right now, because I think it reflects a whole new high in the science of achievements in the history of screw-ups. And possibly fraud as well. Fortunately I’m able to follow this very closely and essentially stop anything potentially really bad from happening, but right now the situation is so stupidly bad it’s getting funny, at least to my very exhausted mind.
So, as my previous entry mentions I managed to pick last weekend to pay a visit to New York City. I hadn’t been there since 2004, so I wanted to take a look round and see what had changed.
I should just have cancelled the whole thing and stayed home. For a car I ended up with a very anonymous Honda Accord, which I don’t particularly like. It’s incredibly anonymous, essentially “15 feet of car”, and the driver’s seat gets uncomfortable very quickly. Friday night before leaving I ended up staying up way later than I should have because various personal things were troubling me. On the way down I took a long and fruitless detour to Greenwich, CT in order to find smokeless Eclipse cigarettes which I had seen on sale there two months previously (those things are pretty much impossible to get). In turn this detour ended up delaying me by several hours in getting to my hotel in Jersey City (bloody NYC traffic). But, Saturday night I was there, it was fairly warm, I took a short walk in the city and got two DVDs for cheap at the Virgin store (Shaun of the Dead and 28 Days Later, both of which I recommend highly). By the way there is now a store just north of Times Square dedicated entirely to M&Ms and M&M merchandizing, I kid you not, and I quite liked it actually.
Sunday was not so good. It was raining buckets in New York due to a late-April “Nor’Easter” storm. The city got about 8 inches of rain. 8 inches! That’s plenty more than… er, never mind. This was supposed to be a tourist day for me. The extent of my tourism was to go to J&R to check out prices. One block and my clothes were soaked, even when I was wearing my Berghaus so-called “aquafoil” jacket. Aquafoil my ass. I am beginning to seriously question the quality of Berghaus goods, frankly. I ended up spending the rest of the day in my hotel room. It was either that or being completely wet all the time. Clearly this was not the right weekend — like I said I should have stayed home. Still, I catch a couple of good movies on HBO, “Sometimes in April” (about the Rwandan genocide, a chilling but very good movie) and “Doom” (not something I’d pay to see but it was a fun and very humorous film).
Well, Monday tops that, easily. It’s still raining quite heavily. I was supposed to meet some acquaintances. Two of them were unable to make it to the city at all (transit was heavily disrupted all over the area due to Sunday’s storm). Another turned out to be at the other end of the continent (my fault, I should have checked ahead of time). But the best (by far) is yet to come.
I had booked my hotel through Travelocity on Friday night. You know, this is the company that advertises with a “roaming gnome”, the people that are supposed to be there if there’s a problem… well, Travelocity and my hotel, the Candlewood Suites Exchange Place hotel in Jersey City, conspired either in malice (not likely) or incompetence (that’s probably more the ticket) to completely fuck me over, up the bum and without lube. This has culminated in a serious credit situation the likes of which are likely to make me never want to use either of these services ever again.
It’s not that the hotel was bad. In fact I thought it was quite good; $140 a night (US) for a clean, relatively new hotel in the New York area is an excellent price. Now, if that was the only thing that had been charged I would have been quite happy. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves here.
At checkout I was presented with a bill to pay, which I thought odd because I thought that Travelocity charged you and then paid the hotel (AND THAT’S EXACTLY WHAT THEY DO!!!). I tell the clerk about this, he refunds the first transaction and asks me to confirm this. I call the travel agent, who INCORRECTLY tells me that I have to pay the hotel myself. The clerk draws up the charges again, and I sign the bill without paying too much attention (there’s only room charges and tax items on there, my spidey sense doesn’t kick in because I’m bummed out enough about the weekend being a fiasco).
I get stuck in endless traffic bottlenecks in Jersey City — all roads into Hoboken, which is my preferred route out (Hoboken to Edgewater to Palisades Parkway to the 87) are blocked, so I have to go up the hill into Jersey City along with thousands of other drivers; people familiar with the area will know what I’m talking about. This gives me all sorts of times to think about how miserable a failure the entire weekend turned to be. And then I remember the numbers on the hotel bill. They just don’t add up.
I pull out my receipt and it turns out that the hotel has charged me for 3 nights. I checked in Saturday. I checked out Monday. That doesn’t seem like three nights to me, and I haven’t been out drinking or anything like that. Immediately I call the hotel, tell them about the error, the hotel clerk confirms and says he’ll refund the old charges and charge the correct amount. At this time I still don’t know that Travelocity has already charged me the hotel, so I think “fine”. I make a mental note to complain to the hotel chain management about this and think nothing more of it.
On the way I stop to get some gas and my card is declined. Oh well, I’ve got cash, so I pay for gas that way. I guess the refund hasn’t been worked out.
Later on I get home and check my credit card statement, which has become a comedy of errors. It turns out that I’ve been charged FOUR TIMES for my accomodations. Once by Travelocity, once by the hotel (correctly), another time by the hotel (3 nights, evidently that hadn’t been cancelled), and then inexplicably there’s one more charge for one night’s accomodations. So if we tally up, Travelocity is charging me two nights, and Candlewood is billing me for a total of six nights. That’s eight nights’ worth of hotels, taken over two nights. What the fuck is going on there?
And that’s the current situation. I’ve contacted Travelocity, the hotel and Visa Desjardins about this, but the frustration I get from this weekend quagmire is just fucking ridiculous.
And as if this weren’t enough, the Border service here in Canada added to the long list of weekend fuck-ups by mistakenly keeping my passport when I crossed the border. I was asked to stop my car at the border station for a brief search; the border guy took a quick look at the car and sent me on my way but kept my bloody passport! This is really the cherry on the sundae here. Well, I’ll take this as a sign and benefactory necessity — there will be no more travel for me for some time. Seriously, I’ll take fuckups, unfortunate coincidences and just plain bad luck at home, thank you very much.