How My Trip to SELF Turned Into a Nightmare

Our writer goes to the Queen City of Charlotte, North Carolina for the SouthEast LinuxFest. Instead of having a good time, however, the trip turned into a nightmare — but the fault lies with Econo Lodge, not with SELF.

What a great time I had during the day I spent at this year’s SouthEast LinuxFest. Those of you who read Friday’s Week-in-Review know that I had planned to stick around for the full three days of festivities at my favorite community oriented Linux and open source conference on the East Coast, but alas that wasn’t meant to be. But what a blast I had during the day I was there.

This, in spite of the fact that I didn’t get the opportunity to do anything or take in any of the lectures. I spent the day at the FOSS Force booth, the first ever for our site at a conference, writing Friday’s column between chatting with folks who stopped by the booth. Jeremy Sands, the events main organizer, was delightful as usual, and made sure that I got a couple of T-shirts.

I finally got to have a face-to-face meeting with Rikki Endsley, a community manager for Red Hat’s Opensource.com. She’s also been a good friend to FOSS Force and has helped us out on several occasions (and will be featured tomorrow on FOSS Force in a video interview with Robin Miller), Although we’ve “talked” several times in the past by email, this was our first “official” meeting, and I’m happy to report that she’s just as pleasant in person as she is via the written word. I’m looking forward to connecting with her again in October at the All Things Open conference in Raleigh.

I also got a chance to meet up with Don Parris, who signed on to write technical articles for FOSS Force at last year’s SELF. You might remember, we ran quite a few memorable articles under his byline, until his real life got too busy and hectic for him to be able to continue to contribute here. I made sure to tell him that he’s missed and is welcome to come back to write for us at any time, but unfortunately he still doesn’t have the time. Bummer.

Not long afterwards, a somewhat familiar looking man approached the booth with a bit of a perplexed look and asked, “Isn’t your name Christine?” It was one of those “I know I’ve met you but I don’t remember where” situations. It turns out that it was Chuck Aurora, who had been at last year’s conference representing the Internet Systems Consortium and who was this year scheduled to give a talk later in the day on “Firewall Fundamentals.”

The FreeBSD folks, along with some representatives of PC-BSD, had the booth next to ours, and their offers to help as I was setting up the booth exactly fit the “hospitality” theme that Sands works to nurture at the conference. I picked up a card from Ken Moore, the lead developer of the made-from-scratch FreeBSD desktop Lumina. He’s a great guy, as is Josh Smith who, if memory serves, is connected with the PC-BSD project.

Unfortunately, the end of that day also ended my good times in the Queen City of Charlotte.

I’d booked a room for Friday and Saturday night at the Econo Lodge & Suites Airport Hotel (704-392-0600, in case you’d like to call to book a room or something) which is located just across the freeway from the conference. About 5 p.m. I drove to the motel and checked in. The room was nothing special, but it appeared to be clean and I was okay with it.

All went fine until about 6 a.m. when I was awakened by a call from the front desk. There had been an “incident,” I was told. Could I come down to the front desk.

“What kind of incident?” I asked.

“You need to come down to the front desk.”

Groggy with sleep, I took the elevator down from my third floor room in my night clothes.

“Do you know about your car?” the desk clerk, a soft spoken young lady asked.

“What about it?”

Someone had thrown a brick through the rear window. This was surprising, since the car was parked right next to the motel’s front door.

According to the desk clerk, a motel guest had called the front desk at about 4 a.m. saying they’d heard the sound of breaking glass coming from the front parking lot. The clerk didn’t investigate until two hours later when another guest coming in from outside notified her of a car in the parking lot with a broken window and glass all over the place. She called the police who ran the tags, which identified me as the owner. She also filed a police report, but didn’t notify me until after the police had left.

What did the Econo Lodge do about this? Just as you’d expect. They were very sorry this happened, but they took no responsibility. They didn’t even offer to comp the room for the night. The only thing they did agree to do was to let me cancel Saturday night’s reservation without having to pay a late cancellation fee.

At this point I should point out that I drive a 1987 BMW with a book value of less than $1,000, so I only carry liability insurance. The entire cost of replacing the glass would be coming out of my pocket.

I didn’t know how much a replacement would cost, but I did know that it would be more than I can afford since I live on a very meager social security retirement income which had recently been reduced by over $120 monthly to cover Medicare Plan B — I just turned 65 in May. I decided to cut my loses and return home, since I really couldn’t afford the trip to Charlotte in the first place.

I stopped by SELF, apologized to Jeremy Sands for not remaining for the entire conference and said my goodbyes to the BSD folks. Sands, knowing my financial situation, suggested that I start a GoFundMe campaign to raise money for the replacement glass, and said he’d gladly contribute if I did. Hearing this, the guys with BSD all chimed-in saying they’d contribute as well. I thanked them all for being so nice, loaded up the stuff from the booth and returned home.

That should’ve been the end of it, but it wasn’t. It only got worse.

Early Saturday evening, I noticed that I had developed some bites, some of them looking more like rashes, on my legs. I didn’t think much of it. Living out in the country in an old farmhouse, bug bites are fairly common, and multiple bites — although not as bad as this — are not uncommon. I figured they’d go away soon enough.

On Sunday I became more concerned. There were more bites with one area turning into a large rash looking area that appeared to actually be multiple bites. On Monday, I stopped by the Urgent Care Center. You’ve probably already guessed the verdict: bed bugs.

The house in which I live is infested, of course, and in this old farm house if the infestation takes hold and gets established I’ll probably never be able to get rid of them. I spent Monday spraying bed bug poison in all of the places I figure they could be, and spent the night on a chair in the living room because I’d sprayed my mattress and thought it too soon to safely sleep on it. The spraying has helped, but it appears as if I’m still being bitten. I say “appears” because I have so many bites as it is that I can’t tell anymore if I’m looking at old bites or new ones. From what I’ve seen online, having a house treated for bed bugs costs on average about $1,500 and can take as many as four treatments. A single treatment at half that would be completely impossible for my household to handle.

The motel has been giving me the run around, which is to be expected. Crystal, an employee who was reluctant to give her last name, requested that I fax the doctor’s report to verify the bed bugs and that the manager, Fred Crabs (really, I’m not joking), would give me a call. After the urgent care facility verified that the fax had been sent, I called the motel to verify it’d been received. It had, but there was a problem. Crystal was concerned that the doctor’s report only indicated that I had been treated for bed bug bites, but not that I actually had them. (The doctor’s first words when he entered the room to examine me was “You’ve got some pretty bad bed bugs, I see.”)

Crystal told me that Crabs would look over the report and would contact me.

Next I called corporate in Chevy Chase, Maryland.

Econo Lodge is owned by Choice Hotels and isn’t too forthcoming with handing out the phone numbers or emails of its officers. I started by calling the number for Guest Relations. After being put in line for over a half hour twice, I called Stewart Bainum, Jr., who I’d found is the Chairman of Choice Hotels (and the son of its founder). I bluffed my way to being put through to Bainum’s office.

I didn’t get past his secretary, but when I explained the situation to her she put me through to a customer relations person named Tim (again, no last name available) after talking to him herself first. Tim dutifully took all of my info, including the police report number and information about the bed bugs, then went through the spiel about how the local motel isn’t owned by the corporation and that it will ultimately be up to the local owner to resolve the issues. He added though, that the local motel owners will be sent the case information and must contact me within 72 hours. He did request that I send photos of the auto damage and the bed bug bites to be included in the file.

Soon after talking to him and sending the photos, I received this email:

Dear Christine Hall:

I’m glad that you have reached out to us about your stay at the Econo Lodge Inn & Suites Airport. I was disappointed to hear of the unfortunate incident you described.

I know this is an important issue to you and want to ensure you that we are reviewing this. I have also sent your concerns to the hotel for their input. The hotel will be in touch with you over the next 72 hours to respond. Choice Hotels’ properties are independently owned and operated, and we rely on the hotel to make the final decision.

I do hope you will give us another chance in the future to show you what a great experience you can have with Choice Hotels. If you should need further assistance, we’ll be waiting with a smile just a call or email away.

Sincerely,

TIm

Your Customer Care Advocate

I don’t expect that these people are going to make me whole.

I’ve also called the Mecklenburg County Department of Environment Health, who will be sending someone to inspect the motel room where I stayed.

As much as I like SELF, I doubt I’ll be attending next year (but we’ll try to have someone on the scene to cover it for you).

I’ve had it with Charlotte.