You may now ransack my room.

In case you hadn't noticed I tend to travel a bit, a lot actually.

It tends to make me a tad high maintenance about my hotel room. This is
understandable since I could be on the one place for more than a week but
I get particular about a few things: too close to the elevator, too noisy.
Too far, too far to walk. is the bathroom big enough? Are there enough
towels ? etc etc.

So I expect things to be in a certain order, and I don't expect my
hotel to fight me or cause me stress. Unfortunately I also don't take
much luggage, and I'm very neat. This has, on occasion, led the hotel to
believe that I've actually checked out.

Mostly this is amusing, you get the odd phone call "Sir, would you mind
paying your bill", or your key no longer works. But last night, things
got a little out of hand.

I came back to my room and discovered that all my stuff was gone. My key
still worked, but there was no evidence that I'd ever been there.

Somewhat panicked and angry I called reception and they did their best
to track down the problem. In the mean time I did a quick inventory and
realised I was missing a few shirts and all my toiletries. You'd be
surprised how annoying this is.

They called back a few minutes later with the bad news

"Housekeeping thought you had left and threw all your stuff out"

Gone, no lost property, no note, just straight into the dumpster.

As my eyes clouded over and I was filled with visions of lurching around
town trying to find a toothbrush and a clean shirt, I spent a few minutes
at being a very irate customer

"... you don't quite get it, that was an expensive, badger fur shaving
brush your minions just absconded with, you can't just get those at the
corner pharmacy..."

And the hotel decided that it was in their best interests to replace my
items. ( and pay cash for the receipts )

But they left me with the actual exercise of getting the stuff. So about
an hour later I had surprisingly found substitutes for almost everything
and was somewhat back on track, but late for dinner.

This morning, on the way out, I left my newspaper on the bed as an 'experiment'

When I came back tonight, it was gone.

And yes, from now on, the shaving brush stays at home.