Dyeing for a Room/Cereal Killer: Qu'est Que C'est?

As many of you know, I've sold my house and I'll be moving out in a few weeks.  For the past nearly five years, it's also housed what became a bed & breakfast.  I've hosted people from all over the world, and am lucky to call some of them my friends.  For the most part, guests were friendly, normal people looking for an affordable place to stay.

Of course, people that ask me about my B&B aren't interested in these people.  They want dirt.  They want to hear about the weirdos, the strange people my Mom warned me about.  I've been entertaining friends and family with some of these stories (thankfully, few) and in honor of my B&B closing, I thought I'd share a few of them on this blog.

My Mom keeps saying that I should write a book, but honestly I don't have enough offbeat/weird/funny stories to tell to make up a book.  But if I did write a book, I would call it "Inn Trouble"--get it, get it?

So I present story number one, which I'm calling "Dyeing for a Room".  A few years ago, I got a reservation for a two-night stay from a man who was coming to Pittsburgh with his wife to attend the graduation of their child at a local university. 

They arrive in the early evening and seem like a nice enough couple--I showed them to their room and gave them a chance to settle in.  They stayed in the less expensive room here, which comes with a bath shared with me.

Later that evening, the wife approaches me and says, "Where can I do my hair?"  I wasn't quite sure what she meant, but said that she can use the bathroom to "do her hair", and even though the bath was shared, it would be available to her most of the time. 

She seemed satisfied with that answer and then explained that she needed to dye her hair.  "I want it to look good for graduation tomorrow."  Um, OK.  Who exactly brings a box of hair dye with them to a hotel?  I would think most people do that kind of stuff at home ahead of time, in their own, familiar bathroom.

She said she would be "real careful".  That should have been red flag number one, because she was anything but careful.  Being of Asian descent, she had inky black hair and was dyeing it to match her natural hair color.  So the hair dye?  It was inky as well.

After they had gone to bed, I was doing my final sweep of the first floor:  turning off the porch light, turning on night lights, etc.  I went to the bath to brush my teeth when I saw my recently painted blue walls now looked like a Jackson Pollock painting.  There was black dye everywhere.  It was like you tried to dye a sheepdog and halfway through he shook himself dry. 

It's OK if I dry my hair by flinging it around, right?

There was goopy black dye everywhere:  behind the toilet, on the walls, on the floor, on the sink, you name it.  There wasn't even any evidence that she had even tried to clean it up: no wadded kleenex in the wastebin, just the box, bottles of solution, and discarded gloves.

OK, I was mad but also realize that sometimes these little family events can be stressful not just for the children, but for the parents as well, and gave Miss Saigon a pass.  For now.

The day they checked out, they left very early to catch their plane home, so I wasn't awake when they left.  But it seems that they left a little departing gift for me:  they tipped over the dispenser containing the equivalent of two boxes of cereal.  If that wasn't bad enough, after the entire two boxes of cereal cascaded onto the floor, they walked all over it, crushing it into the floor and the rug.

No attempt was made to clean it up (I'm noticing a trend).  They did leave a note:  "Sorry - we don't know how this happened (I do--you knocked it over).  We couldn't find anything to clean it up with (how about your hands?)."

Did they leave a tip for the mess they made?  No.  I have a tip for them:  don't come back.