Rounded corners

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I stay in a lot of hotels. Well, more specifically, I stay in the same few hotels quite often. It's an artefact of my job, and I don't mind it as much as sometimes I may protest.


Until recently, whenever business brought me to Manchester, I would stay in the Palace Hotel in the centre of Manchester. It's a lovely, big imposing hotel with an enormous lobby which gives a great impression.


My first stay at The Palace was great. The time before last I was in a room which had a great view of the trains going in and out of Oxford Road station. So great a view, that I could see which newspaper the commuters were reading as they went past on the morning trains. And freight trains can be noisy things...


My last stay at The Palace wasn't particularly nice. A fire alarm going off just after I'd got into bed, and then a horrible bout of food poisoning overnight didn't give me confidence in the hotel restaurant, so I decided not to stay there again.


So I'm staying in a different hotel this time. It's quite nice. Not easy to get to without a car, but I don't mind a bit of a walk. It's attached to a Starbucks, a fitness centre, a pub and a restaurant. This means the reception was full of people milling around - not a great welcome. And then I found out that the restaurant is fully-booked, Starbucks is in the process of closing, and room service has a two hour wait with the first order taken at 7pm. So basically, I can't get any food tonight.


But besides that, maybe the thing which has caught my attention the most is the stupid design of the bedside table in this hotel. Look at this picture...



The bed is the white bit in the lower left of the picture. Of course, the lack of corner means that I'm not going to bang my head in the night. It also means that everything so far which I've put onto the table has slowly (or quickly) slipped off the curved bit and ended up on the floor underneath the bed. And yes, the table on the other side of the bed is the same.


Annoying...

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