Sometimes The Lightbulb Just Doesn’t Go Off
My family and I had just flown from the US to Ireland for a ten-day vacation. We were spread out over two hotels across the street from each other. Our flight came in at around five or six in the morning, so we were exhausted and just wanted to curl up in a bed and sleep.
My aunt and I were sharing rooms for the trip, so we checked in, went up to the room, and started to explore the room. We were having trouble figuring out how to turn the lights on. There were no wall switches, but some of the lamps had knobs. We tried turning them over and over and over, but no luck. We searched all around the room for a switch but came up empty.
My aunt went down to the front desk to ask about how to turn on the lights, and they told her it was on the wall. I found some odd-looking contraption on the wall near the door with what looked like a button. When I pressed the button, the lights came on, but as soon as I took my finger off, they turned back off.
We could not figure out how to keep them on, so we went back down to the desk. They were never rude to us, but you could tell they thought we were idiots who didn’t know how to operate a simple light. They came back to the room with us, took our key card, slid it into the contraption, and walked off. We stood there, dumbfounded.
We had never come across this in our one or two hotel stays a year in the US. We told my other uncle about our troubles that night at dinner. He, being a more seasoned traveler than us, chuckled at us, remembering his first time. Apparently, these key card contraptions to activate lights are in the US, but they are definitely not frequent.
