Wednesday, June 08, 2011

Vegas Venting

A week in Las Vegas sounds like a lot of fun, but I've been here so often that the novelty has long-since warn off. While I still enjoy this trip every summer for the World Series Of Poker, after awhile the little annoyances build up and I have to vent. Today my ire is aimed at the hotel I'm staying in, The Rio.

The rooms (all suites) are nice and spacious, but I'd like to find whoever designed the layout and ask why they have a window in the wall between the bathroom and the bedroom. It means that whenever someone goes in there and turns on the light, it shines right on the beds and, with the odd hours people tend to have in Vegas, can often mean that whoever was trying to sleep is awakened by whoever came in late or is up early and taking a shower. There is absolutely no reason for that 10" x 10" window, unless the hotel does a lot of business with voyeurs.

I'm unfortunate enough to have a room on the pool side of the hotel. It's not the view I mind (even from several hundred feet up), it's the pounding music they play at the pool from 10am on. It's really cranked up and echoes off the surrounding walls to create a cacophony that makes it difficult to sleep or get any work done in the room during the day. Yes, this is partly a function of the upside-down hours I keep on a poker road trip, but with a hotel full of World Series Of Poker players all trying to sleep late, there's no reason to blast the tunes. I'd bet that most of the people actually at the pool don't like it either -- it's loud enough to drown out conversations in the lounge chairs.

For some reason, the electric eye on the auto-flush toilets in the Rio men's rooms are set on ultra-super-sensitive. So much so that they often flush while you're still sitting there. As if that wasn't annoying enough, they flush with such force that the water sprays up every time. I think this may be to appeal to their European visitors who still use bidets. But for Americans, it's a far-too-moist pain-in-the-ass.