If you’re a seasoned Internet veteran like me, and you can remember the days when the Internet had a competitor called BitNet (does anyone remember BitNet?), you’ve probably run across one of those urban legend e-mail chains that everyone and their dog had seen by the late 1990s: the one about Mrs. Field’s cookie recipe.
The story, for the uninitiated among you, went something like this. A young woman went to the counter at her favorite bakery that sold Mrs. Field’s chocolate chip cookies. After purchasing and ingesting a few of them, the young lady returned to the counter and said, “My, these are good. May I have the recipe?” The clerk behind the counter said that the recipe was company property, but that she would sell it to the young woman for “Two-fifty.” The woman agreed, handed over her credit card, and got the recipe.
A few weeks later, the woman’s credit card bill arrives and she discovers that while she thought that the clerk meant “$2.50,” the clerk actually meant “$250.00,” and the e-mail concludes with what I’m told is a competent chocolate chip cookie recipe and a note from the cheated young woman saying that she was going to ruin the company by spreading their recipe far and wide so that everyone could make their own Mrs. Field’s cookies and never need to purchase them again.
The message was, I suppose, entertaining, and I received it a good dozen times over the years. It’s written up in a few of those internet rumor debunking sites as one of the widest spread urban legends on the net.
I’ve got a story of my own, and it’s completely true.
The conference that brought me to Albuquerque was held at the Embassy Suites Hotel in Albuquerque. It was a fairly small conference, and the local coordinating board had decided not to provide any A/V equipment for the breakout sessions other than a screen. They provided a note in the acceptance form saying that presenters should work out any A/V use with the hotel directly.
Natalie and I had originally thought of bringing our own, but neither one of us remembered to do so, something that Natalie brought to my attention on Friday (our session was Saturday). I went to the business center and said, “Hi. We need to reserve an LCD projector for our session tomorrow.” The lady at the business center asked me what time and room the presentation was in, and said it would be taken care of. I thanked her, and went on my merry way, happy that the issue had been solved. Later, I thought it was a little weird that she hadn’t asked for my name or room number, but thought that maybe I would just have to sign for the equipment when it was brought to the room.
When we got to the room for the session the next day, there was no LCD projector. I went off to find one of the A/V people (this hotel seems to specialize in having copious amounts of staff on duty at all times except when you actually need someone) — “Hey, we were supposed to have an LCD projector.” He dutifully brought it, but told me that I would need to talk to sales before he could hook it up, as the conference had no central billing for A/V, which I knew.
I went over to Sales, and the pleasant woman took my name and room number — never mentioning the cost. (You see where this is going). The session went fine, and at the end of our 50 minutes, I thanked the A/V guy and Natalie and I went on to bigger and better things.
The next morning, my hotel room bill was slipped under the door. There was a $19 charge for the pizza Natalie and I had delivered from room service on Thursday night, and a charge from “Banquets and Catering” for $386.64.
And my eyes fell out of my head.
I went down to the front desk. “Can you explain this charge?” I asked.
The young woman at the desk typed in her computer, and said, “It’s for an LCD projector.”
“I used it for an hour. Doesn’t $386 seem a little high?”
She frowned. “Yeah, it does. Would you like me to call Sales?”
“I would love for you to call Sales.”
Very long story short: it wasn’t an error. The Embassy Suites in Albuquerque, unlike every other hotel or convention center that I have ever done business with, does not rent LCD projectors by the hour or half-day. If you rent an LCD projector from them, you pay as much for 5 minutes as you do for a full day. At the end of my long-winded fit to the Dude from Sales in his cheap suit and $3 haircut about how it was poor customer service on their part not to let me know that in advance because we didn’t need the projector that badly, he cut the bill in half. Which came out to a little under $200.
Shortly afterward, Natalie caught her airport shuttle and Ray and I got in our rental car and we left the Embassy Suites Albuquerque, at which I intent to shoot very nasty looks as we drive past on our way to the airport on Wednesday.
Beware, my children.
