Transient Transplant

After working a 16 hour day in Salt Lake City, I walked through a Trader Joe’s in a daze looking for the wine aisle as clearly I deserved a drink.  I figured that I would treat the coworkers I was meeting at the hotel, and we would split a bottle.

Then all the memories from working in Utah several years ago came flooding back as I was struggling to find the wine aisle.  I had to go to an actual liquor store to buy booze because this was Mormon country. They couldn’t make it easy.

I sighed and figured I’d just crash that night anyways, I was so exhausted from being up to head to the airport at 2 am.

We made it a priority the next evening to make a liquor store stop.  My coworkers and I each bought some wine and figured that we would have a drink on the patio by the pool at our hotel.  

It’s important to note that this patio, which was open to the public, was also accessible from a sliding glass door in my room.

I found this incredibly unsettling.

Not only was I living in prime real estate for late night peepers looking through my curtains, I was also waiting for someone to bust in the patio door and murder me.  

I wasn’t feeling great about the room location.  But it did make the commute to the patio very convenient with my wine.

My coworkers and I all met outside, cracked open a bottle of wine and poured a glass.  People were being loud and boisterous in the pool and a man was reading his nook on the chairs outside, so there was plenty of pedestrian traffic.

It was getting close to 11 pm.

A man came out of the hotel who looked exactly like Dwight Schrute’s cousin Moses in The Office.

He bee-lined toward us, looked perturbed.  

“Oh, is the patio closing?” asked one of my coworkers.

“No,” he said, incredibly seriously.  “It is illegal to be drinking in a public place.”

We all looked at each other in shock.  We were on hotel grounds, and the patio was enclosed, so I didn’t really see it as being a big deal.

So I said ok, and put the bottle back in the bag while we all sat outside talking.

Moses started coming out and giving us the stink eye every 5 minutes, despite the crowd around us.

One of my coworkers told me how when they had both arrived the day before I did, they decided to look around at the patio, check out the gym, etc.  Nothing out of the ordinary for figuring out new hotel digs.

Then out of nowhere, Moses Schrute appeared, asking them if he could help them or if they were lost.

Needless to say they were a little creeped out.

His vibe in general was unsettling.

We decided to pack it up on our patio discussion once he kept popping up and “passing through” very indiscreetly to keep an eye on us.

The next evening, we decided to sit in my room and at least leave the curtain open so we could see the mountains while having our nightcap after a long day.

A few minutes in, there was a knock on my front door, which caused a complete panic in me.

We all laughed, and one of my coworkers said “It’s probably that creepy dude.”

Sure enough, I opened the door to his smirking face.  

“We’ve had a noise complaint against you, so make sure you keep it down.”

I wanted to smack that smile off of his face.  

I was convinced we hadn’t actually been that loud, and that he had been “doing his rounds” outside and just seen an open bottle of wine and came to cause trouble.  

This was just a theory, of course, but it wasn’t unbelievable.

If I wasn’t weirded out about this room beforehand, now Moses knew where I was housed at night.

I didn’t think he would murder me.  He would more likely break in my room in the middle of the night just to sit in the corner and watch me sleep.

So I slept with a chair in front of my door that night, and was grateful that I only had one more night left to worry about the Cabernet Creeper before heading back to Seattle.