22

22

In the morning, I decide it might not be a bad idea to give myself a bit of a cover story so I call down to the front desk to complain about the noise from the room next door last night.

“They were blasting their music so loud, and it was after three in the morning, it was so damn obnoxious. They woke me right up out of sleep!”

“Did you call to notify us at the time of the incident?” the operator asks. I can tell from the tone of his voice that this is a conversation he has had one hundred times too many.

“Well, no . . . ”

“Then what exactly do you expect us to do about it? If you’d told us about the incident at the time it was happening, we could have addressed the matter and resolved it without causing you any further discomfort. Unfortunately, our engineering team has not yet cracked the secret of time travel, though I assure you they are working diligently on it, so at this point of the morning there isn’t anything we can do to address the problem.”

I sudde