I’ve been getting very self-conscious when it comes to checking out of a hotel room recently. Not the act of checking out itself, I should explain: the whole process of going to the front desk and making small talk to answer the questions of how was your stay and I hope you’ll be coming back again soon? isn’t something that particularly bothers me. (Honestly, I find the small talk at check in more uncomfortable, for some reason; chances are I’m here for work and I don’t really care about the minibar, I promise.) Instead, I’m talking about everything that happens before I actually leave the room for the last time.
There’s an obvious finality to closing that door for the final time that leaves me wracked with doubt: Have I packed everything? Am I sure that I’ve packed everything? Maybe I should check the bathroom one more time, maybe I forgot my toothpaste. The older I get, the longer it takes me to leave a hotel room, because I’m increasingly convinced that in doing so, I’ll leave something of great value behind. Never mind that I rarely have anything of great value in any hotel room I’m in, beyond my work stuff; I become anxious at the idea that anything left behind would suddenly become valuable, retroactively.
All of this was in my head as I checked out of my hotel in San Diego the other week, only for the regular check-out process to be interrupted by a couple literally running into the lobby of the hotel and immediately rush to the elevators, where one of them jumps in and the other runs back to the desk, all-but-yelling “Do our keys still work? Do they?” They’d left something — a vape, as it turned out — in their room and it was apparently of the most upmost importance that they retrieve it, to the point of mania.
I watched the couple’s utter panic with no small sense of amazement, but also relief: no matter how fearful I might be of leaving something in a hotel room, I’d never be that bad, after all. As I’m thinking that, the wife turns to the woman at the front desk and says, conspiratorially, “It’s like this every time. I don’t think we’ve left a hotel without having to rush back in and scream in years.”
Sometimes, all you need is the slightest hint of perspective to set you straight.