by Adam Carolla
And while we’re on the topic of being disturbed, let’s do away with the wake-up call, please. These do way more harm than good. There is nothing louder than the phone in a hotel room. You want to be woken up, but you don’t want to evacuate your bowels and suffer tinnitus when it startles you from your slumber. And far too often the call doesn’t come at the right time. I’ve had this happen. I was staying in New York last year and my seven A.M. wake-up call scared me awake promptly at six thirty. You should get a free week’s stay at the hotel if that happens. That is an assault. I’d rather have someone kick down my door and rape me awake on time than get called a half hour early.
The only problem with this plan is that fucking alarm clocks in hotels are never positioned the right way. I’m not sleeping on the floor facing the clock, I’m on the bed staring at the fake wood veneer on the side of the clock. This is not helping the anxiety I have about missing my flight if I don’t wake up at six A.M. The same anxiety is keeping me awake, and therefore making the alarm clock necessary.
So you attempt to turn it so you can see it from the bed. But nothing hates turning more than that clock. It’s like straightening out an old person. I’m straining harder than Gene Hackman trying to turn that valve in The Poseidon Adventure. And sometimes you can get the clock to turn but the cord isn’t going along with it. It’s hanging on to the back of the nightstand like a villager clinging to a tree in a tsunami. Customer Service 101: in a hotel room, all clocks should be visible from the pillow.
Now let’s talk about hotel bathrooms.
I miss the “sanitized for you protection” ribbon on the toilet seat. I’m bringing that back. It made taking a shit feel like a ground-breaking ceremony. I expect to see a guy in a suit with a hard hat and a golden plunger. I always had a dickhead fantasy of sliding the ribbon off, taking a shit, not flushing, and then putting the ribbon back on just to leave a little present for the maid. But I never did it. I just loved the feeling of breaking that ribbon too much. It was like I won some sort of fecal marathon.
Speaking of the fecal marathon: Some of you may know a tale from my previous tome about pissing into an ice maker because the urine countdown had started and I couldn’t get into my room. Well, this past year I had a similar incident. I was at a hotel on the road and staying on the ninth floor. I had a very nice suite, but that meant it was at the other end of the hall, as far away from the elevators as possible. I had just rolled in after a long road trip, gone through the usual rigmarole at the front desk, and hustled upstairs to drop a deuce. Well, like the other nine out of every ten times I check into a hotel room, my key card didn’t work. Knowing that I was T-minus two minutes until the fecal had landed, I did the butt-cheeks-clenched run to the elevator to go down to the desk and get the card fixed. I hopped in, pressed lobby, and went down one floor. The doors opened on the eighth floor and two blond twin boys with white-trash faux-hawks were standing there. One of them grabbed the left door, the other one grabbed the right. Then they just stood there staring at me like an Alabama version of the two girls from The Shining. I asked, “What are you doing?” They said, “Our dad’s coming.” I asked, “Well where is he?” They said, “He’s in his room.” I was going crazy. I was thinking, “Were you sent here from hell to force me to shit myself?” I said, “You’ve got to let the door go.” They said, “No, we’re waiting until Daddy comes.” Even though judging by their haircuts Papa was probably the kind of guy who carries a .38, I pried the door out of their Mountain Dew–sticky fingers and headed down to the desk. I managed to have them replace the key card and get back to the suite just in time to obliterate the bathroom.
Here’s what we don’t need in hotel bathrooms. I was staying in Utah, and there was a gold-seal sticker on the toilet paper that held the loose end to the rest of the roll. Because we’ve all dealt with the horror of the next piece of TP flapping in the breeze, mocking us. Well, when I went to wipe in Utah I tore off the first few inches and realized I had left the sticker on there. I haven’t shit for two years.
The hotel bathroom is not only the place where I shit, it is now the place I’m forced to go when I need to smoke. Nowadays the majority of hotels are smoke-free. When you check in you have to sign something that says you won’t smoke or there will be an extra $250 on your bill for cleaning. First off, really? One fat Guatemalan chick with a spritzer of Febreze is $250?
I felt the sting of this new policy especially hard in Winnipeg. It was the end of a long night after the travel—a situation at customs which you’ll soon read about—the gig, and the postshow autograph signing. It was after midnight when I got to the hotel and it was zero degrees outside, so I was sure as shit not heading to the curb to blow a butt. I went into the bathroom, removed all the towels—they’d be the evidence of my crime because they absorb the scent—and stood over the toilet blowing the smoke into the fart fan. At a certain point I caught a bleary-eyed, exhausted glimpse of this pathetic scene in the mirror and thought that perhaps I should have gone down to the curb to smoke and found the sweet relief of hypothermic death.
I didn’t get caught that time, or the hundred times since. But if I ever did get the $250 fine, I would surely fight it, and here would be my argument to the hotel. You’re charging me a fee for smoking up the room, but meanwhile you pump porn in so that people can beat off with impunity. I imagine that if you were to ask the patrons of your hotel which they would rather have, the room in which someone recently smoked half a Marlboro Light or the room where a guy made a jizz pentagram on the bedspread, they’d go for the secondhand smoke instead of the left-hand beat-off every time.
In my America, hotels are now 50 percent smoke-free and 100 percent spooge-free, though it will be sad then to see all the guys outside on the sidewalk twenty feet away from the entrance beating off into the gutter, bumming lube off of strangers. Though as I’ll soon be staying only in presidential suites, I’ll enact an exception for them. I’d be honored to sleep on Eisenhower’s crusty sheets.
And finally there’s this.
I took this picture in a hotel in Milwaukee. I looked at the back of my door and noticed the peephole. But then I looked just below it and thought, “What is this? That glory hole will work for me, but what about the average-sized gentleman?” I then realized it was a peephole for little people. At first I was angry about lawyers and how everything has to be constructed to accommodate everyone nowadays, but then I thought, “C’mon, Adam. Quit being an asshole. Midgets can be businessmen, they can travel and use the same hotels you do, and they’ll need to answer their door too.” But then I thought, “What are the chances another midget has come to rape them? When the midget looks out that peephole, isn’t he just going to see the regular-sized person’s balls? ‘Wait a second, I don’t recognize those balls. I didn’t order a Denver omelet. Turn around, let me see your asshole.’ ”
So to recap—hotels will soon be decaf-, room-service-tip-, double-peephole-, novelty “Do-Not-Disturb”-sign-, wake-up-call-, key-card-electronic-control-, and jizz-pentagram-free, all with one stroke of my presidential pen.
THE FOOD-SERVICE INDUSTRY
This is the fastest-growing sector of our economy, because our fat asses are the fastest-growing sector of our bodies.
As a former McDonald’s employee, I did plenty of complaining about that company in my previous book. And it’s obviously a thriving American business. But I’d like to offer one suggestion. I know the plan is to shut down breakfast at ten thirty and switch to the lunch menu, but you are missing out on millions in Egg McMuffin sales. Especially on Saturday when ten thirty is still hangover time. If you don’t make this change, I’m going to do it for you. I’ll just roll into Mickey D’s at 10:25, order sixty-five Egg McMuffins, stand at the front of the drive-through, and tell all the people rolling up hoping for one after ten thirty, “Here’s your Egg McMuffin. That’ll be eighty-seven dollars and a blowjob, please.”
And I would like to order McDonald’s to knock it off with the toys
in the Happy Meal. This has created an aspect of our culture that I see, and despise, with my kids. Every day they need a new toy. Every meal, every event, every trip to the park needs to be commemorated by bringing home a cheap piece of Chinese plastic shaped like a character from whatever forgettable animated movie is out that summer.
Here’s a new law for all restaurants, especially delis and diners. Once you serve over seven different kinds of sandwiches or more than two varieties of french fries, you must also offer coleslaw. There’s nothing more annoying than going to a restaurant, ordering a nice pastrami or smoked-turkey sandwich, and not having a side of coleslaw to go with it.
Strike that. The only thing worse is when they do have coleslaw but have gone all fancy pants with it. I got some coleslaw the other day with apples and cranberries in it. I’ve seen coleslaw with golden raisins. Stop trying to make it good for me; it’s not salad, it’s just a way to feel good about eating mayonnaise and corn syrup. Coleslaw wasn’t broken, stop trying to fix it.
And enough with the cold butter and chilled silverware. This is not a luxury. Think about everything that is luxurious—heated car seats, mink coats, massages—all warm. Warm is a luxury, not cold. So why are you giving me frozen butter that is harder to spread than the gospel at an al-Qaeda training camp and an ice-cold knife to do it with? Are we not aware that attempting to spread butter at anything below room temperature tears up the bread? You end up with a crust corral enclosing a golf ball of bread with a frozen butter center.
Just like the theme hotels, I don’t need the theme restaurant. Your only theme should be good steak.
The prime example of this is Medieval Times. This is a nerd version of Benihana. You have to sit with strangers and eat mediocre food while watching wannabe actors pretend to be Knights of the Round Table. I don’t know anyone who thinks, “The prime rib at Arnie Morton’s is great, but there’s just not enough tournament. I’m heading to Medieval Times.”
And if you do have a theme restaurant, I don’t need the cutesy bathroom door signs. Is anyone frequenting your establishment even though you have shitty food and terrible service because of your hilarious bathroom door signs? You’re not seeing too many Yelp reviews reading, “The food sucked and the waitress was a cunt but the bathroom doors said ‘T-Birds’ and ‘Pink Ladies.’ Terrific.” The food-service industry is full of government codes, so in my administration, we’ll be adding one more. Just put MEN and WOMEN on the bathroom signs. I don’t need the signs that say CABALLEROS and SEÑORAS at the Mexican joint or a picture of a mustache or a lipstick kiss mark at a trendy place. Don’t get clever or abstract. This is a lawsuit waiting to happen. One day I’m gonna have a couple glasses of wine and bust into the ladies’ room and have to shout, “Sorry, I had to piss and I didn’t know if I was a Doe or a Buck.”
TATTOO SHOPS
One American business that is doing just fine is the tattoo industry. This is boom times for them. In the fifties it was just merchant marines and a few actual marines getting anchors or hearts with “Mom” in them on their upper arm. Now chicks and black guys are getting them in droves. There’s no way this could have been predicted when Eisenhower was president. Imagine a black guy going into a tattoo shop right after WWII. Depending on which part of the country he did this in, he might not have come out alive. Now you can’t be in the NFL without an illegible tattoo on your arm, or, in some cases, face. And chicks getting tattoos? Forget it. They would have been declared hysterical and put into an asylum back in the good old days. I think this started in the seventies, but really broke in the eighties with punk and the nineties with grunge, and now it’s game on. There’s no way that Marilyn Monroe would have gotten a tattoo. She was the Pam Anderson of her day. Can you imagine Pam Anderson without a tattoo?
But the reason I want to get the government involved in this issue is that I don’t think it’s a great sign for our future. There are more people under thirty who have tattoos than ones who don’t. This makes me shudder. It shows that the next generation has no plans for the future. If you put the barbed-wire tramp stamp on your lower back, you’re living for now, as the Pepsi ad commands. You’re not thinking about how the tattoo is going to look at forty-five when you’re bending over pulling your brood out of the minivan. This “fuck the future” attitude is the cause of many of our nation’s biggest problems. Everyone lives their life like a meteor is going to hit the planet next Wednesday. There used to be elders who told us how to prepare for the future. Now, if anyone over forty tells anyone under thirty anything about life, the response is “Fuck you, old man. Go change your diaper.”
Last year the city council in D.C. proposed a waiting period for tattoos. I’m down with this notion, and will make it a federal law. I think the waiting period should apply based not only on age but also on tattoo. No matter how old you are, if you want to get Wile E. Coyote on your titty, you’re going to have to wait while we check to make sure you’re not on government assistance.
Clearly I have all the ideas ready to go when it comes to commerce. I have a million plans for how we, as a nation, can make better products that will not annoy our fellow Americans. Less annoyance equals more opening of the wallet, right? But because I will be president and commander in chief, I will have to focus on other things, like the size of my American-flag lapel pin, and I will need a Secretary of Commerce to put all my great ideas into practice. I need someone who can take abuse, because my new rules and regulations are going to piss off a lot of the business community and also the entrenched political interests that have created the red tape I’m going to cut once and for all. I am also, as you can see, going to raise the standards for all businesses so they make better products and we will want to buy their goods, not just shit from China because it is cheaper. That’s why I’m nominating as Secretary of Commerce Sanjeev Mehta. He works a phone bank in Mumbai, goes by the name Dave, and would be happy to provide you with excellent customer service today.
THE U.S. POSTAL SERVICE
The U.S. Postal Service is on its way out. And I’m fine with it. I don’t need mail.
I lived in a house that had a large wooden gate at the end of my driveway—a gate I built myself, by the way. I put a mail slot into the gate with a basket hanging on the inside to catch the mail when the mailman put it through. One day I got a note from the post office saying that I needed to have a mailbox outside the gate next to the street. This was clearly so the mailman could pull up, put the mail in the box, and drive off without having to get out of his weird jeep with the right-side steering wheel. This is clearly more convenient for him, but a major inconvenience for me. If I did it his way, I would have to go all the way down my driveway, use the clicker to open my gate (which doesn’t work half the time—don’t get me started), and risk getting stuck on the wrong side of the gate in my bathrobe while the van full of hicks taking the tour of the stars’ homes gawk at me. That’s the other part: with the box this far from my abode, it’s easy pickin’s for anyone walking down the street to grab something and steal my identity.
So I left a return note that said for the amount I pay in taxes, the guy can get out of his truck. They responded that I was not in compliance with blah blah blah. I responded with the message that I didn’t need this service. My important mail goes to my accountant. So they could kindly take the PennySavers and flyers for shitty sub joints and bring them back to the post office to recycle them, or shove them up their ass for all I cared. They’re just going to end up in the garbage or my bushes.
The postal service is dying for the best reason possible—competition. E-mail killed the letter and UPS and FedEx do a better job with packages. UPS takes the doors off their trucks because opening and closing them would add an extra thirteen seconds. I’m sure their uniforms are brown so that they can just crap themselves rather than taking the time to shit. In fact the uniforms used to be white, but rather than slow down their delivery, the drivers delivered a deuce in their shorts. You’ve never seen a bunch of UPS dri
vers hanging out, leaning against their trucks, blowing a butt and drinking Snapple. You don’t see fat FedEx guys, because they get paid based on performance. Go to the post office and tell me if you notice a difference. You’ve got a line out the door with one surly Korean bitch behind three inches of Lexan to handle it. If they were doing a great job or were incredibly vital, they wouldn’t be considering ending Saturday delivery. Restaurants that are making money aren’t saying, “Let’s close on Saturdays.”
That said, I can’t stand the guy who complains about the price of a stamp going up. If I handed you a piece of paper and said, “I want you to get this to Maine in two days, but I can only pay you forty-six cents,” you’d punch me in the face.
I feel like the government makes my point about how incompetent and useless they are over three hundred times a day. The latest example was when the Michelle Obama “Let’s Move” fitness campaign came out with a line of stamps showing kids doing activities like running, jumping, and skipping rope. You know, important stuff we need to use our tax dollars to inform kids about. And what kid even deals with stamps anyway? When was the last time a kid went to the post office to be inspired? Plus, a kid that is really into stamps and is unaware of jump ropes isn’t going to get off his fat ass anyway.