Creative Commons photo courtesy of Sri Dhanush.
I’m helping out with BarCamp Minneapolis, a.k.a. MinneBar, which takes place on May 7th. The event takes place at Best Buy’s headquarters out in Richfield, and we out-of-towner helper-outers are staying downtown. If you know any good and reasonably-priced hotels in an interesting but not sketchy part of downtown, please let me know in the comments or drop me an email!
Back in April, I travelled to Moncton on business and stayed at a hotel where I found this pamphlet on the desk in my room:
As you can see, they didn’t go for more delicate phrasing like “What to do in the event of a hotel fire”. The title’s much closer to “How to not die while staying at our establishment.”
The French don’t have it any easier. The title they see translates to “Hotel Fires!! What to do to stay alive?”
Many of the numbered points in the pamphlet don’t simply use the word “fire”, but accent it with two exclamation marks: “Fire!! in your room” and “Fire!! in another part of the building” are two examples. Perhaps the writer took some inspiration from the band Panic! at the Disco.
“Few people are burned to death in fires.” This is true – in a fire, smoke inhalation is far more likely to (ahem) smoke you than the actual fire itself. I wasn’t disturbed by reading this fact, but I can see some hotel guests being a bit disturbed by being told which method of death was the more likely one.
For some reason, point number seven in the pamphlet reminds me of what just about every electrician trying to make small talk while doing repairs has said to a customer at one time or another, often with a country-fried drawl: “It ain’t the volts that kills ya, it’s the amps!”