Omg Hotel Pennsylvania sucks

Customer service is a tradeoff you get with price, thus I'm not terribly offended by things such as that recent terrible Comcast support call. If you don't want shitty service/product, then pay more. Often simply paying 10% more yields something vastly better.

The only problem is finding those "deals".

I'm at the HopeX conference, so to make life easier, I decided to stay at the venue, the Hotel Pennsylvania. Since it's a late booking, the price was $199 a night for an "upgraded" room. The room was horrible. It was tiny, the walls in the bathroom were crumbling as the damp seeped into the concrete, the furniture was scraped and dented, and the room's one tiny window looked out onto other rooms only 20 feet away. I could bear all that -- but the "non-smoking" room stank of smoke to the point that I couldn't fall asleep. So at 1:30am I gave up and checked out.

I went two (short) blocks down to the Hotel Affinia, which cases $224 for a room that's twice the size and "upscale": everything is nice new and pretty, and this non-smoking room doesn't smell a bit like smoke. It doesn't even smell like the deodorants hotels use to try to mask the smoke. The lady at the desk confirmed that they get a lot of customers from the Hotel Pennsylvania, like this one customer who entered their room to find a rat eating discarded food housekeeping hadn't cleaned up.

So I write this not because OMGWTF is the Hotel Pennsylvania bad, but OMGWTF why didn't anybody tell me??!!???.

Behind the Hotel Pennsylvania checkin desk is a six-screen multi-monitor setup running WinXP displaying live content, with a warning message that the firewall/AV is disabled. I was soooo tempted to not checkout and stay up all night hacking the network instead, because goatse.