Hotels and technology

OK, I'm all in favour of technology. I'm the bloke whose house is slowly becoming a digital mecca, I have screens all over the place, the music in every room can be controlled from a phone, and I have a photo frame in my kitchen which alerts me to when the bins need taking out. I'm a geek, I love technology. So it's great when hotel rooms have little control panels for all the lights next to the bed, and the telly is less of a dumb VDU and more of an entertainment hub.

There's a proviso... if it's not obvious what something does, it should be labelled. I'm in the Trento Grand at the minute, which as the name suggests is quite posh. Sadly, like most posh hotels, it's shit. Ignoring the late night bar which seems to shut at 9, the pathetic excuse for a car park and the fact that they seem to have taken a leaf out of Ryanair's book in that you have to pay extra for everything, the rooms are technological masterpieces that are generally about as intuitive as an Apple product in that they make no logical sense whatsoever.

Firstly, it's sadly quite common for plug sockets to turn off by themselves if you leave the room, but this place goes one better... the sockets go off if the lights all go out. So no overnight charging of phone. I solved this problem by unplugging the desk lamp and plugging my phone into the socket where that was, and then leaving the desk lamp 'on' overnight. Of course in my mad stress session trying to find a socket that didn't go to sleep as soon as I did, I ended up unplugging the mini-bar and didn't realise until the evening. Hopefully they won't charge for all the gone-off food in there.

There's a switch by the front door that clearly does something, but I've no idea what. Switching it from one side to the other makes a light change from green to red, but nothing else obvious. I've left it on green purely because that's where it was when I got here, but I might leave it on red when I check out. There's also two wall panels, one in the bathroom and one in the main bedroom, which seem to contain an IR LED. Not a sodding clue why, but they do look a bit like HAL to me. Additionally, it's quite creepy how there's a light on the outside of the door that says if anyone's in the room or not, and that the cleaners seem to like drawing/undrawing the curtains for me as soon as I leave the room for 10 minutes.

What the fuck does this do?

But what pissed me off the most, I had a shower this evening. There's a vent at the top of the bath with a white cord next to it. Not wanting the room to become humidified, I pulled the cord to turn on the extractor fan. Nothing happened. Then when I got back into the main room I noticed a funny smell (a bit like a fan motor burning out) and the panel by the side of the bed was flashing "HELP". Additionally, the panel on the outside of the door was also flashing red. I tried turning the A/C on and off, lights, going out and coming in again, opening the window, nothing. I then went round the back of the panel, pulled it out and realised it's nothing more than a dumb terminal with a couple of RJ-11s plugged into the back. Unplugging it and plugging it back in again did nothing to stop the flashing. So I got dressed and trowpsed down four flights of stairs only to be told in broken english that the cord in the bathroom is the alarm and I shouldn't have pulled it. I asked how to stop it, I was told it'd stop itself. 20 minutes later it was still flashing and clearly it was a pointless alarm because nobody had come to see if I was OK, so I went back downstairs again, spoke to the same bloke, who got quite grumpy that I was back again and told me not to pull the cord again. I refused to leave until he turned the alarm off, which he eventually did. It was quite a complex process involving typing my room number into a computer and clicking a mouse three times. I can see why he was so annoyed he had to go through all that just for my benefit.

Anyway... everything now seems to work ok, and I'm leaving tomorrow, although I will be exchanging all the towels in the bathroom for the biggest turd I've ever produced. Probably in the sink.