Flashback to 1995: We've spent the day in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, strung out from having driven in from Toronto the night before. We have no concrete plans other than museum hopping (with a decided medieval history bent) in Toronto and NYC and meeting up with our best friend in Madison on the way home to Eau Claire. And it's our honeymoon, so we're on our own itinerary, darnitalready. Reservations would just cramp our style, y'understand...
I have no idea what was going on in the Big Apple that weekend, but I do know that the motels were pretty full-up. Midwestern sensibilities aside, we would have paid outrageous bling for the privilege of renting a smoking-allowed room. (Blech.) We found ourselves at the pay phone of a strip-mall ice cream parlor, flipping through the yellow pages, having zero clue where we are in relation to the suburbs listed under "Hotels." Which is when the genius whose brand-new ring bore a suspicious resemblance to mine said, "Okay, Best Western has an 800 number listed here: Let's see if they can do anything for us."
One phone call later, we had reservations and driving directions. And we could laugh--albeit with a slightly hysterical edge--at the Best Western's agent's apologetic "It looks like it could be a 15-20 minute drive: Is that okay?"
Now, Machiavelli (quite characteristically) wrote:
...he who gives up his own convenience for the convenience of others, only loses his own and from them gets no gratitude...Me, I call BS. Yeah, fifteen years was a generation in the late quattrocento / early cinquecento: I get it. Yet I sure-as-sunrise remember the exhaustion and rising desperation that evaporated in mere moments, thanks to one cog in the wheel of a brand-name company. Maybe the folks Machivelli spent most of his career brown-nosing underrated gratitude for their own self-interested reasons. Whatever. But here in the 21st century, Mr. M. can suck it.
