Hoteliers are “outraged”? I can see grossed out or annoyed, but it’s not going to cause permanent damage to their rooms.
I was about to comment on that too. Outraged?
The only thing I can think of that would warrant outrage over someone’s sex toys would be if the toy in question had some sort of excretion still obviously present.
So, leave your sex toys where you want, but FFS people, wipe them down first!
If something outrages you, and it’s a weekly part of your job, you’re really really in the wrong job.
I read the linked article hoping for more information about what specifically caused “outrage” but was disappointed. I’m a little outraged by that.
When a friend of mine found the previous occupant’s (we assumed) bra in her room she wasn’t outraged. She merely wondered how the cleaning staff missed it and quietly disposed of it.
Back about eight years ago, I worked for a local city-focused magazine who provided a very nice hard-cover metropolitan city-guides to area hotels to be put in all of their respective rooms, provided they allowed a magazine employee (me) to check out ten rooms to see that they were being properly placed. Sometimes they were kept with the Gideon Bibles, sometimes with the restaurant menus. One local hotel that wasn’t part of a chain kept them in a drawer in the TV cabinet. So, I go there to do my thing, and when I check the drawer, I do find the book…and a cat-o-nine tails and a strip of unopened condoms. The room HAD been put to rights by the housekeeping staff - as far as I knew. I called the hotel later to tell the desk person what I had found; it’d been to embarrassing to do so at the time as a man was present and I hadn’t the courage to say it, LOL!
This is likely one of those stories I wrote about yesterday, just PR from the hotel deals site, utterly fabricated.
“If you want to turn a journalist’s bullshit detector off, send him ready-to-post free content about what he thinks is a trivial issue.”
And then some arsehole reblogs it at Boing Boing because sex toys.
Now I have an image of a gigantic bin in the bottom of a hotel full of dildos and vibrators that they keep around just in case a guest wants theirs back growing so large that you could swim in it like a ball pit.
Sounds suspiciously like the opening of my soon-to-be released porn parody of Duck Tales starring Screwed M’Cock…
Like a ball pit lol
Been working in hotels for 15 years.
So, one day, my boss asks me to throw out the lost & found pile, which had grown to take up half a room. (Depending on which state it’s in, we need to keep things for 30-90 days, after which they’re thrown out or claimed by hotel staff) As I’m loading the cart, I notice how much of it is good stuff- We had had a family staying with us for several weeks after losing their home in a fire, and they had received a ton of donations from different people and charities, most of which they left behind as the new place was too small for all of it. There were clothes and toys still brand new in the box, and I felt bad about throwing it all out. So I go ask my manager if he minds if I donate the stuff to a local shelter/thrift store.
He says “Sure.” After a moment: “Oh- You may want to take out the bag of dildos first.”
Towards the bottom of the pile was a bag- Everything had come from one particular room: A quart sized jar of lube and at least a half dozen rubber dicks that would put Ron Jeremy to shame. When I threw the bag away, one of them turned on. I could hear it buzzing in the otherwise empty dumpster all the way across the parking lot for the next half hour.
No way I was reaching in to turn it off.
I can see a little outrage,
“That custom vibrating unicorn penis must have cost at least a hundred bucks, and they just left it here!”
When I was working at a gas station for a while, my boss told me a story about how she was taking out the trash by the pumps (perhaps one of the most disgusting jobs I have ever performed… people in these parts like their chewing tobacco *shudder*.) She found a tremendous dildo someone had thrown away, along with a vial of lube. She told me that she wrapped it up in paper towels, brought it into the store and walked up to the person who was cashiering at the time. With a completely straight face, she confronted her with the dildo yelling, “GodDAMN it, how many times have I told you to leave your stuff at home!”
I feel we should write science fiction about this.
At the north end of the Las Vegas strip, one steps out of the taxi to a cluttered and disjointed replica of another world, a Palazzo of cement etched with remarkable precision into a facsimile of old Europe. Even the space between street and entrance is labyrinthine, a disorienting landscape designed for cars and very specific lines of sight. One finds the porté-cochere eventually and steps through the crowd of tourists into the hotel’s lobby, whose ennoblement seems inversely proportional to its gradiose scale. From here one proceeds down vast hallways, as massive as anything this side of Byzantium and decorated at even greater expense.
Then there is the cavernous, maddening casino. Beyond this, deeper into the bowels of this place, there is a mall, as enormous and gilded as any on earth. Past this there are banqueting places and ballrooms, each half the size of a football pitch, and here the tourists are gone, and you are in the calmer, more Ballardian world of conferencing support, of abandoned projectors and a million neatly-stacked chairs and acrylic carpet that will feed postaocyalptic bacteria for millenia.
Then there are the endless mazes of hallways, the stairs down. Then the pine-scented yet dusty places where the hotel and casino staff work the unseen magic that makes the complex run. In the distance, the sound of a truly magnificent catering operation, clattering and murmuring away. Down another level, in an elevator large enough to accommodate a small helicopter, one is in a suddenly bustling place full of security guards and mysterious laborers. I am not supposed to be here and am challenged.
“Oh, next level down,” he checks my credentials. “I’ll escort you.”
And even there the place is massive, though the lights are slightly dimmer and the walls and fittings reduced to standard business America, 40 feet beneath the glamor and garishness of the hotel proper.
My destination is a walk around inexplicable corners, in quiet silence. A certain electrical gloom sets in. This is a place into which few go. We are met by a handsome, graying man. Three piece suit. C-Suite.
“Glad to see you found your way down here. We had someone meeting you but you musta walked right past them.” From the voice you know it’s Davison. “Glad to see you ran into Scott here.”
Scott nods at Davison and heads back toward the elevator. Davison smiles and beckons me into the room beyond.
I already know what it is. The scent of silicone and phalates reaches beyond the door. It’s what I’m here to deal with.
The legendary ball pit of the Venetian
No sex toys please, we’re british? This was a UK survey.
“Our hoteliers are constantly amazed, often outraged, perhaps a bit flattered and intrigued. by the things that guests routinely leave behind”.
Best closer this story could have had.
Some people manage to get outraged because a stranger gets to marry their partner, or another stranger gets to smoke pot without fear, or yet another stranger is dressing in a way they don’t like, or some people are having sex without the sanction of a celibate priest. It’s outrage inflation, and it won’t be long before we are in Zimbabwe dollar territory. It’s outrageous, really. 
(ETA proper grammar)
Above all was the sense of hearing acute. I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell. How, then, am I mad? Hearken! and observe how healthily --how calmly I can tell you the whole story.
Right before my orchiectomy I was asked if I would like a “prosthetic”. And when I say “right before” I mean they were just about to wheel me into surgery. I’d been in the hospital twenty-four hours and they chose the last possible minute to spring this question on me. I think the timing was a result of the word “smartass” being in my chart, and they knew if they’d asked me earlier I would have come back with “What colors have you got?” or “Could I have five or six?”
Shockingly a ball pit did not come to mind, but now that you mention it I figure there’s gotta be a factory that makes the prostheses…
For some reason I’m getting more of a humorous hard-boiled detective novel with some speculative fiction vibe. Sex toys in the future… shape changing, learning, semi-aware items more discreet than the ken-doll sexbots that stuck out like a sore thumb and required almost as much maintenance as the flesh and blood version.
The ball pit would be writhing mass of sexual pleasure. Even dipping your hand into it could send the average person into sensory overload.
Oh god. I think you just invented a new fetish.
