Drawing Them A Picture

When I posted about our trip to Turkey I mention that I had to draw them a picture. I wish I was exaggerating but that’s actually exactly what happened.

A bit of background – when I was traveling for our government (yeah I know, it was over 12 years ago LET IT GO!) one of the safety things we learned was to always use the hotels safetybox for your passport, tickets and a valid credit card. If there isn’t one in the room the hotel always have one in the reception. That lesson is still with me. So still everytime we arrive in our room, thats the first thing I did. And I checked it every day to make sure they were still there. But after 3 days I couldn’t open it. At first I thought it was “user error”, i.e I had set the wrong code when locking it (every time you locked it you set the code) so I tested every combination of it. But I thought it was weird that it didn’t say “error” or “wrong” or something when entering the wrong code. It was also weird that it didn’t have a “lockdown” function after 10 failed attempts. Instead it was constantly showing “bA-hI”. After not being able to open in the 100th attempt I googled the error message and it’s apparently a sign that it’s on backup battery power and saying the “battery charge level is high”. But when on battery it won’t open the safe, kinda the opposite of what happens in “Die Hard”. Looking at the powercord showed it had been repaired atleast once so it’s more than a probable reason for this.

With this information I went to the reception to say that it was broken. What they heard was “another dumb ass guest f*cked up his combination to his safetybox and we need to save him”. So they promptly sent a guy from maintenance to hook up his unlocking device and open it. But before he did I showed him the error and he looked confused as hell over “bA-hI”. But understanding is irrelevant, only results matter so I was happy he opened it so I had access to our passports again.

Then I tried locking it and ofcourse that didn’t work. Because it can’t look while on battery power either. So again I went to the reception and told them about it and what they heard was “another dumb ass guest f*cked up his combination to his safetybox and we need to save him”. I tried explaining to them but in the end I had to draw them a picture to explain the error message and that it didn’t have any power. I think they understood me, they just didn’t have an answer for it and it wasn’t working even on the day we left. I’m just happy our passports weren’t stolen!


About the Author
Author

stoff

Leave a reply