well, no wonder this hotel is so terrible!

At the supermarket this morning I glanced at one of the local tabloids. The front-page story was about what a disaster this hotel and its sister establishments are. Apparently they’re all in receivership due to major mismanagement and debt problems under the previous owner.

Now it all makes sense… The dysfunctional service culture and generally unhelpful employee spirit… The once-in-a-decade disaster breakfasts… The intermittent internet service with worse-than-feeble range… The badly faded glory of what must have been a gorgeous edifice in the fairly recent past… The generally disheveled design outlook, coupled bizarrely with a few hyper-advanced quirks like the high cubist abstract shower controls.

According to the story, the staff here are all in limbo while a new buyer is sought. Now I see they’re just demoralized by the management situation, and will no longer view them in the same bad light as initially. They’re simply at a low point of distraction and insecurity. Incompetent ownership is to blame.

I’m leaving in a few hours anyway.

The only time I received a bigger shock from a news item was in 1996 or so, when the top story in the Chicago Reader one week was about a scuzzy landlord who had left all kinds of asbestos in an apartment building near Kedzie and Montrose– and it was the place where I had lived just two years earlier!

That was the same place where, on my way out the door for the last time while moving out, my key broke off inside the lock. I took that at the time as a signal never to return.