An update including our local HIE stay

 It's a lazy, chilly, late March Sunday, the day after celebrating birthdays and Easter with my extended family at a restaurant. As I sit at my desk watching a Will Ferrell marathon while I look for interesting articles to read or sports stories to follow, I decided it would be a perfect time to write a blog entry. But what to write about?? 

My shoulder is ready to go for golf season as I'm able to do pushups on a bench, maybe even the ground, but I haven't tried. Today I went to Golf Galaxy to take some swings with new drivers, but there were too many people there. I'll go back midweek and see what I can do then. 

On Friday, the pergola off the back of the house was taken down, piece by piece, as we prepare for construction to start on our three season room. Very excited!

The Bears decided to allow the man who traded up one spot to select Mitch Trubisky instead of (at the very least!) standing pat at taking whichever of three QBs would fall to him. Spoiler alert, the other two were really good and Mitch was really bad. That same guy had just signed Mike Glennon for a guaranteed $19M in the offseason. He also sucked. Then the same guy trades a fourth round pick for Nick Foles and guarantees him $21M. He also sucked. So the Bears give him one last shot in free agency to right the ship, secretly extending his contract for a year (I'm virtually certain of this) to match his head coach's contract, and he lands Andy Dalton for $10M guaranteed for one year, more than triple what Dallas paid him last year. It's a clusterfuck at Halas Hall. Only a marquis, proven QB can save them. 

One final note, we decided to do a staycation at our local Holiday Inn Express. Below is the letter (and review) that I wrote and posted on several travel sites. No response, 3 weeks later. Contrast that to the local Domino's which gave us flat bread bites  and received a strong rebuke from yours truly. The manager there gave us essentially 4 free orders of bread bits and two desserts. Here's my HIE letter: 

Before posting our review on Yelp and travel websites, we wanted to provide you with a recap of our experience at the Mokena Holiday Inn Express last Friday, February 26.

"We live in town and decided a few weeks ago to have a staycation at this hotel for a night and let our two children, 6 and 8, swim to their hearts’ content.  To make sure the pool was open, we called two weeks ago, at which time they told us that they couldn’t know for sure that the pool would be open, but that it was open currently. Midweek last week, we called again and actually made the reservation at which time we were told the pool was indeed open. Finally, we called FRIDAY MORNING at 10:00 to make sure the pool was open and told the desk person that our SOLE reason for coming to the hotel was for the pool. We were told the pool was open and, in fact, we could check in early (1:00). How nice!

 So you can understand our immense frustration upon checking in at around 1:30 when we were told that the pool was closed. Several times over the next 90 minutes we called the front desk to ask about when the pool would open, why was it closed and why were we told it was open when it wasn’t? We were also told that the front desk had to wait for the General Manager to call and tell them it was okay to open the pool and that the GM was offsite currently and they couldn’t reach them. This means if there was a robbery or the hotel was on fire, nobody on site could reach the GM? That hardly seems likely and if it is then it’s almost worse than lying to us. What an absolutely ridiculous chain of command you have in place if that’s true. “Here’s the only person who can make decisions, but they are unreachable.” That should never be the answer.

Finally, I went down to look at the pool myself and there was a genuinely pleasant, bearded man there skimming the pool. He told me the pool was completely fine and we could come down and swim whenever. I went over the front desk to both inform them and verify that this man had the authority to open the pool (though he was obviously an HIE employee). There were two women working the front desk and one, who checked us in, was at least pleasant while being unhelpful. The other, with red hair, was an embarrassment to all customer service employees. When approached with the information about the pool, she reiterated that she had to wait until the GM gave approval. To which I replied, “Then who is working on the pool and telling me it’s ok?”

“I don’t know.” She replied.

“What do you mean you don’t know?  It’s a bearded guy.”

“I don’t know who it is. I can’t see through walls!” She obviously wasn’t planning on moving from behind the front desk and traverse the 25 yards to the pool and see who it was.

“So there’s a guy working on your pool and you don’t know who it is? This isn’t Disney! It’s not like you have thousands of employees. You probably have, what, 5 people working here today?”

“No sir, we have more than 5.”

“Well one of them is working on the pool and he said it’s okay to swim.”

She continued to insist on hearing from her unreachable GM. She also declined to go investigate who was working on the pool and what they had to say, so I had to go over and ask him to talk to the women at the front desk because they weren’t listening to me. Again, he was super pleasant and said that he would. 

It’s seems to me that pretty high on the list of duties of a front desk person at a hotel,  right behind checking people in and out, is knowing who is in the building and especially who is working. Her rudeness, unpleasantness and shirking of responsibilities would certainly prevent her from working at any company that I would run, so I figured someone in charge there would want to know about our experience. "

Those who know me well, KNOW that my first version had a ton of swearing in it. I really wanted to convey to the owner of this property though that they had a subpar employee. If they choose to ignore it, that's on them.