Travelers who stayed at the Ottawa Jail Hostel in March 2013 woke up when a noise from the trash bin turned out to be a rat. The rat couldn’t get out because of a slippery plastic bag lining the bin. One of the travelers, “rocenrol,” went downstairs and griped to a staff member, who removed the bin, “and for the following 2 days no one gave us an apology.”
Rocenrol was upset. About the rodent and humans. “[S]leeping in an old building doesn’t mean you have to deal with rats,” rocenrol wrote. “[N]o one mentioned this incident so they are probably used to it,” he aspersed. “[W]e hoped for an apology we never got.”
Ottawa Jail Hostel
Sooo, you stayed in a jail. And there was a rat. YOU WERE LUCKY YOU DIDN’T HAVE TO PAY EXTRA. Also I hear it’s a great location.
The general manager of the Ottawa Jail Hostel responded to the TripAdvisor review. “I am sorry to hear that you had a poor experience in Jail,” it said, in part. “Our staff… removed the garbage can and the offending rodent, apologized for the interruption of your sleeping experience and felt that they had solved your problem and through [sic] nothing else of it. They should have informed management for a number of reasons, one to allow me the opportunity to check up with you and secondly, to ensure our pest control system was put into action.”
Before I was radicalized by my jail experiences.
The response went on to describe the (obviously not perfectly successful) pest control measures the Jail Hostel uses, and concluded, “In your case several steps were missed by my staff and for that I do apologize.”
That’s bad. The part about ‘for that I do apologize’ stresses the difference of opinion as to whether rocenrol got an apology from the person who removed the rat. Offending rodent. They’re kind of calling rocenrol a liar. Maybe the employee lied, or remembered wrong. The manager should treat that as a possibility.
Rocenrol may have hoped to be comped for part of the stay, which seems reasonable to me, since they were woken from sleep. By a rat, a nasty nasty rat.
But still, it’s an old jail! Some say it’s haunted by ghosts of hanged men that appear at the foot of your bed. There are unmarked graves all over the grounds. THE GALLOWS ARE FULLY FUNCTIONAL. You saw a rat, but it could have been a rat carrying a severed hand clutching a bloody knife.
After my jail experiences. If I don’t sleep, no one sleeps.
Actually, that would have been better, wouldn’t it? Better story.
Eh, can’t always be lucky.
I’ll bet it was not a nasty, nasty rat. I’ll bet it was a really CLEAN rat…
I don’t know, maybe my standards are too low, but I would have been satisfied with the prompt removal of the rat, and would have been surprised if there had been more than a perfunctory, pro-forma apology (which is probably what the employee did).
You sleep in a jail why? So you can say you slept in a jail. It gives you some chance to claim to understand what it might be like in jail (fail). So a rat certainly adds verisimilitude.
Imagine the rat problem faced by former inmates. Maybe the problem is that the guest got fed too well in the “dining room”. Otherwise he may have had an entirely different attitude to finding a free rat nicely captured. (See recipe in “Lobscouse and Spotted Dog”, Grossman & Grossman, 2000)
In the future, easily solved. Small card on pillow, “Rats, mice, and ghosts, no charge,
courtesy of the management.”
my world-traveler youth-hostel-lovin’ friend agrees with david. she did not think this incident was apology-warranting OR that the apology was bad. but then, she is a rat.
I defer to no one in my admiration for rodents. Yet I do not feel they should dictate SorryWatch content. If something in the wastebasket is going to wake me up in the middle of the night, it had better be at least a capybara to avoid the apology penalty.
Maybe in my dotage I have become an entitled prima donna type traveler…but I have stayed in actual hovels in Tunisia, India, and oh my god Nevada, and if I see a rat in my room, you will find me a new room – in another hotel – and not charge me a cent.