Sunday 19 July 2009

Breaking the bar tab..

It's a funny thing being a grown-up organising an event for a large number of people on foreign shores - you really have to think of everything! You see, we are having a bar tab tonight for participants and one of the issues discussed was how to stop other people accessing the tab - they are going to have to show their shiny new name badges. The coordinator was somewhat bemused that I thought that this might be a problem...

I suppose they say that the best way to catch a criminal is to use a criminal...you see in my student days my best friend and I were backpacking and once wandered into a posh hotel and settled ourselves down by the pool. We then proceeded to order drinks and charged them to a random room number figuring that:

a) Someone rich enough to stay there probably wouldn't notice a few cheeky cocktails; and

b) If they did then it really was the bar staff's fault for being stupid enough to serve us without a key or cotton onto the fact that we were far too scruffy to have been staying there.

Late last night my mind was wandering to how that situation could have turned out. Just as we ordered our third cosmopolitans at the bar, blithely giving the room number 227 I was tapped on the shoulder by a tall, dark gentleman (this is my fantasy ok...). It turned out that he was in fact staying in room 227 and less than impressed that we had been running up his bill. We were given a choice - he could report us to the hotel who would call the police or we could allow him to deal with it in a more traditional way.

Reluctantly we followed him into the lift, and rose up through the floors to the penthouse suite. He bent us both over the chaise lounge and explained that there was an excellent local way of dealing with such outrageous behaviour before ordering us to drop our bikini bottoms. At this point a bit of an argument took place, which ended in us conceding that we didn't have much choice - after all at least he was fit. We held hands as he gave us six strokes each with the local malaca cane, one for each drink ordered. Then he pulled our bikinis back up, commented that you could see the stripes on either side of the bottoms and escorted us out of the hotel and into the street...

2 comments:

Paul said...

Rebecca, nice fantasy, I reckon that your tall dark stranger went a bit easy on you. WEG
Warm hugs,
Paul.

Master Retep said...

At the very least, we would expect one stroke for each unit of local currency the drinks cost - so, the swankier the hotel, .... A good lesson in free market economics for scruffy students trying to play upmarket.