I went to a business conference in Austin, Texas in January of 2019, and a bunch of weird things happened all directly related to the room the hotel had assigned me. If you want know about one, two, or all three of these things, read on.

1. The Room

The first thing you need to understand is that this was my first full year as a member of the board of directors for an independent, not-for-profit, technology user association. The association was in charge of an annual conference that drew around three thousand people, and in the years since I’ve learned a lot about how these things work. I’ve written about my attendance at conferences like this before, but now I was in the inner circle helping to actually execute the thing as a volunteer. One thing I learned is that executive suites, limo transportation, and certain VIP perks are built in to the overall package when your organization commits to thousands of hotel rooms. You literally can’t host a conference without this stuff. Disclaimer: My actual employer wasn’t footing the bill for me to attend; I was there on my own time, and in the capacity of an event volunteer. So don’t come at me, bro!

I wish I could remember the name of the hotel. It was surely some flavor of Hilton, Marriott, or Hyatt, in downtown Austin, Texas. As I said, it was my first year on the board of directors of this organization, so I was surprised at the airport when a man in a too-large, rumpled suit holding an iPad with my last name on it in bold, block letters helped me grab my suitcases, then led me to a black SUV with tinted windows and drove me to the hotel. OK, kinda baller! I was more accustomed to calling a Lyft and waiting out on the curb, trying to determine ten minutes later which Toyota Camry was mine. This was definitely a treat for a stoner from North Hollywood like me.

After checking in at the front desk, they gave me a room key that said 2208/2210. I didn’t understand what that meant, but I didn’t pay it too much attention. I took the elevator to the 22nd floor, then followed a sign that said 2201 – 2210 down a hallway that seemed to end in a T.

But before the end of the hallway, there was a door propped open, directly facing me. I walked through this doorway and saw room 2210 on my left, with the door closed, and room 2208 on the right, with the door propped open. I walked into 2208, naturally, and there was a bellman in there setting up some items on a little table in the “living area” of an immaculate two-room suite.

As he placed chocolate strawberries and cheeses and crackers on a little tray I thanked him as I began to unpack. He welcomed me to the hotel and hoped my stay would be a pleasant one. I asked him about the propped door at the end of the hall that I had walked through to get to my room, 2208, as it seemed to have the same kind of door handle and locking mechanism as all the other rooms. He said “Oh, just keep that door propped open.” OK, I replied. But what was that room across the hall then, 2210? “That’s someone else’s room.” Fine. A strange arrangement, but whatever. What did I know about the ways of comped suites on the luxury floors of Austin hotels? I did wonder though, what would happen if the door that led to 2208 and 2210 was closed? Would my keycard let me in? Would it let the occupants of 2210 in? The universe is a realm of mysteries, and I doubted I would uncover most of them, including this one.

I thanked the hotel employee for the snacks and swore I would find him later to offer him a gratuity, as I was not prepared with cash. Rookie move, I know. In a shocking twist to this story, I never did find him later. Sue me! I carried my own bags to the room; I didn’t know there would be a MAN IN THE ROOM WAITING FOR ME!

There was a blue box on the table next to the snacks. Some champagne flutes stood nearby; they had come from the box, I discovered. I examined the flutes and the box; they the seemed to be from Tiffany & Co. Wow! That’s quite a gift. I could get used to this lux life! Well, I had no time to snack or examine the flutes any further. My phone was blowing up with group texts from my fellow volunteer colleagues: Where are you? We’re in the hotel bar! What time are you going to be at dinner? My flight was delayed! I’m still in my Lyft from the airport… These were not all directed at me, but we had a very tight crew of volunteers from all over the country who were descending on the hotel within a few hours of each other, and we were desperate to meet up and hang out, as we only saw each other a couple of times a year.

The next few days were a whirlwind, as they always are at these events. “Work hard, play hard” is not a motto we invented, but we abide by it. We were in meetings and educational events by day, helping the paid organization staff in whatever ways we could. By night, we partied. Nothing extreme, only the rare lampshade on the head, but sometimes a group of anywhere from six to twenty-five of us would descent on someone’s hotel room, depending on the size of the suite, and have some drinks and the occasional 80’s dance party. Typically the conference chair or the board president – in later years I would act as the former, but never the latter – would have *really* nice suites, meaning it was possible to host incredible parties. The next year a close friend and colleague of mine had a two-story suite with three balconies, four bedrooms, a gym, three bathrooms, and a full kitchen. We called it the Jay-Z & Beyonce suite, because someone said the power couple had once stayed there. I’m not sure if that was true. Regardless, these niceties come with the conference package; you don’t pay any more or less for them. Someone has to use them!

In Austin this year, however, room 2208 was in no way that ostentatious, but it was very nice. I would be in the hotel for six nights, and I was more than comfortable in the corner suite with a living area separate from the bedroom and bathroom. Can you imagine? When I was married, my children’s mother and I would stay in some truly nightmarish accommodations up and down California: rooms barely bigger than a solitary confinement jail cell with three kids under the age of ten attempting to run around like lunatics – as kids do – but being thwarted at every turn by thin walls and nowhere to go. It was the hospitality version of a family straitjacket.

But I kept wondering about that room across the hall, number 2210, which, remember, was written on my room key envelope alongside 2208. Why was there a door at the end of the hall that led to both rooms? Why had the bellman instructed me to keep it propped open? I kept hearing his authoritative voice: “That’s someone else’s room.” I was in and out of 2208 several times a day, and I never saw nor heard my neighbor in this strange cloister at the end of the hall. About two days in I closed the door that led to both 2208 and 2210. It had a key reader on it. I wanted to see if my key would unlock it. It did. So I could get into the door that led to 2208 and 2210, and I could get into 2208. That’s when the devil in me said, “But sir, can you get into 2210?” I looked left, then right, then down the hall. I furtively listened at the door of 2210… and tried my card.

No luck. The keypad flashed red. I made a hasty retreat to 2208 and quickly shut the door behind me, sure that suspicious and violent people were looking out of the peephole of 2210 at the exact moment I tried to run my card and then scurried across the hall. Whew, close one! Still, by the next day I couldn’t stop wondering about 2210. It didn’t make sense to me. Why were two rooms secluded by a common door at the end of the hall? Finally, I called the front desk.

“Hi, I was just curious about my suite setup. My card key envelope says 2208/2210.”

“Yeah?”

“Well, I’m in 2208, and there’s a door that I have access to that leads to both 2208 and 2210, but, like, what actually is 2210?”

“That’s yours too.”

Wait, what? WHAT!! THAT’S MINE TOO??? My head spun around in three full circles as I tried to process this information. I let them know that I had tried my card, but it didn’t open 2210. “Oh, sorry,” they said. “Let me reprogram that for you. OK, try that again.”

I hung up and went across the hall and tentatively scanned my key. Green light.

It was like Dorothy discovering Oz, like Harry discovering he’s a wizard, or Lucy finding Narnia in the back of the wardrobe. I opened the door to a wonderland of amazement and adventure! OK, I exaggerate. It was just another room in a hotel, but one without a bedroom. Only a large area for entertaining, a bar, and a whole other bathroom suite. What in the actual fuck??? I immediately arranged to host an 80’s dance party in my new wing for later that evening.

The next morning, basking in my newfound elbow room, I realized I could now close that door at the end of the hall, and leave the doors to 2208 AND 2210 propped open full-time, and basically have a whole house with multiple rooms at my disposal. Truthfully though, after the 80’s dance party that night, I never had need for all the space. I made a point of drinking my morning coffee over in 2210, with a view of a different part of Austin from the floor-to-ceiling corner windows, just, you know, because I could. I enjoyed the super-suite for only the latter half of my stay at the hotel, sadly, because a bellman setting up strawberries and champagne flutes propped one door open and told me another door wasn’t mine. Oh Bellman, Oh humanity!

2. The Shirts

During this time, January of 2019, I was in the best physical shape I’d been in since maybe my early twenties. I would turn fifty later that year, but about two and a half years prior to this time, at the age of forty-seven, I began an exciting fitness and weight loss journey. I had gotten pretty, shall we say, *comfortable* from my thirties to mid-forties. I was married, I had children, I worked full time at a mostly sedentary job. I coached the kids’ sports teams, went on their school field trips, had family and other commitments, and tried to steal a little time away here and there for myself, but I overall was living what some would say is a “normal,” suburban, American life. I was not unhappy. I wasn’t one hundred percent happy either, but who is? The kids provided a mountain of joy along with a fair amount of heartache and hair-pulling, but I wouldn’t trade any of it for the world. Physical fitness, however, was never at the top of my list. I was probably my fattest in my mid thirties, once even tipping the scales at a ghastly 209 pounds, which is a LOT for a five-foot seven-inch frame. It’s embarrassing to be a short guy but need XL T-shirts and 36″ waist pants. Big hoodies, thick flannels, and cargo shorts were my best friends. American Dad 101.

As the kids got older I was able to eek out a little more free time. I began to ride my bike on my daily work commute and errands instead of driving my car. I tried to walk more, hike some, and go for a jog very occasionally. I coached all my kids in various sports at one time or another, so that helped some. By the time I was forty-six or so I was down to about 192 pounds. Not fit enough to get out of the XL T-shirts or 36″ waist pants, but much better than 209. The main problem was that I ate like a fucking pig.

Put food in front of me, I ate it. Leave some on your plate, I ate it. If it was in the fridge, I ate it. I ate and ate and ate and ate my way to being way heavier than I had wanted. Then right before I turned forty-seven it changed. I wrote about some of that period here, but a big change that happened in 2016 was that I joined a gym and started eating better and eating LESS. The pounds started melting off, more from my kitchen habits than my gym habits maybe. By January of 2019 I was recently separated, living back in Midtown, Sacramento, starting to date again for the first time in decades, and feeling great physically. I was not feeling deprived food-wise as I weighed myself and tracked the weight daily. I was clocking in at a svelte 155-158 pounds. Yes, a full fifty pounds lighter than my heaviest days in my thirties, and easily 35 pounds lighter than just four years prior. (Disclaimer from the beginning of 2024 here… I’m about halfway back to my fattest, normally now weighing in at the 177 – 179 range. I don’t feel good about it, but I do seem to have leveled off, and I have kind of plan for getting back down some.)

One of the great and terrible things about losing a lot of weight is that you need ALL new clothes. It’s super fun, but also expensive. In early 2019 I was riding high – despite the hit to my wallet – routinely sporting size medium T-shirts, occasionally even smalls when it came to roomy button-up shirts or jackets, and 31″ waist jeans. I needed so many new clothes, I didn’t know how to handle it. I didn’t know how to shop, or where to shop. For a few years I did Stitchfix and got pleasantly surprised every three months with new clothes in a box that my “personal stylist,” – working with in the strict confines of an algorithm, I’ve learned – sent me. Sometimes I kept lots of things from the box, other times I kept only one or two. It was a great way to get new clothes without having to trudge out to the stores and suffer the indignities of parking lots and dressing rooms. And who doesn’t like surprises that come in a box!

(I abandoned Stitchfix after two or three years when they finally sent me a box of absolute shit. They have your measurements and general style preferences on file, which is why it was weird to be sent an entire box of stuff that didn’t fit size or fashion-wise. Their deal is: Only keep and pay for what you like, and ship the rest back within a week. The catch is there’s a $25.00 “styling fee” that is waived if you purchase even one item in the box. As a loyal customer for a number of years, with never a problem, I figured they might spot me the styling fee for the shit box they sent me (it was my first month with a new algorithm-assisted stylist). Nope, fuck off, they said. We’re charging you $25.00. I said fine, we’re done! And done we were. Haven’t been back, won’t go back. They have my $25.00, but not my hundreds – maybe thousands – of dollars worth of clothes since then. Good business, people, good business!)

Lots of my new clothes were concert T-shirts, not from Stitchfix, but picked up at some of the shows I had attended during the preceding couple of years. Some may have been size medium, and others might have been small-fitting larges. I had a Justin Townes Earle shirt, a Zepparella, a Conor Oberst shirt that I purchased personally from Phoebe Bridgers, a Sacramento Republic F.C. or two, and a David Bowie shirt that I bought at the great man’s concert in 1990, that almost 30 years later I became miraculously able to fit into again. There were surely two or three others that I’m forgetting now. I loved my concert shirts. I wore them untucked (cool), tucked in (maybe not), under sports coats (umm… okay), I wore them with everything. I felt very affectionate toward them. They were sometimes even conversation starters with strangers who knew the band.

Let me digress here for a moment. Now, you, as a free person, are at liberty to wear whatever kind of shirt you want. But if you walk around with a T-shirt of, for example, Neil Young’s Harvest album at a brewfest, and a stranger (me) says, “Hey, great album!” as you pass by, do not put on a fucking stink face and scurry away because you were spoken to by a stranger. You are a thirty-something year old man with a decent beard, for goodness sake. Be willing to acknowledge that the advertisement you put on your torso has generated an opinion from a passerby, and you must be willing to – if not discuss, as I’d prefer – at least acknowledge a comment. And God forbid you wear a Nirvana tee from Target and don’t know how to opine about whether Bleach is accessible or not to the average rock fan, the way Nevermind was.

I loved those tees and I loved talking about them if strangers had something to say. I loved how well they fit my new frame. I loved that they reminded me of amazing adventures from concerts or soccer games with friends. I loved that I could now pull off wearing the the soft, thinly woven “vintage” style of T-shirt that had become popular, and no longer felt the need to wear the Hanes Beefy-T cotton suit of armor style. I wasn’t trying to hide my body behind a T-shirt anymore. I loved those shirts. And I lost them all forever in that Austin hotel room, number 2208.

How did I lose them, you ask? Were they ripped from my body by sex-crazed conference-goers? Were they flung off the balcony as I drunkenly dived 22 floors into the hotel pool? Were they burned by spliffs after partying with a reggae band? Or were they freely given to Austin’s less fortunate: huddled, cold, and camped by the river? No, I just left them there.

I was anxious as I was packing up to leave the conference, because I was flying from Austin to visit and old friend on the East Coast. The shirts were in the middle drawer of three drawers. Apparently I cleared out the top and bottom drawers, but for some idiotic reason I failed to pack the middle drawer, or even check it on my way out. I had a lot of luggage. I was so hyper focused on my weight and fitness in those days that I even packed my scale, I’m embarrassed to admit. And somehow in the chaos I left the shirts behind.

But I never should have even put my clothes in the hotel room drawers, you say. Why not just leave them in the suitcase on that little folding stand, like a normal person would? Well, one, I am not a normal person, and two, you need a LOT of clothes at this conference. It was my first full conference on the board of directors, so I had to come in early for meetings. It was seven days and six nights, and that was before my next trip to the East Coast. Those seven days are looooong ones, too. Typically meetings or events early each morning, while each night would routinely last until between 11PM and 2AM. Long days and nights: working hard, playing hard, learning a lot… you need to sometimes do two or three changes a day. Some affairs are more casual than others. In sum, it’s tough to do out of a suitcase. You really need to organize your shit better than that. I even bring a Hefty bag for dirty clothes when I travel. At least that’s how I, a weirdo, do things. And normally it works out fine, except when you leave your treasured T-shirts behind.

I arrived at my friend’s house on the East Coast after a long day saying goodbye to my conference friends and flying several hundred miles. Later that night, as I went to change out of my airplane shirt, frantically rummaging through my suitcases and backpack and dirty clothes bag looking for my beloved tees (I didn’t wear most of them. If I had, they’d have been with the dirties, safe and sound), my heart sank. They were gone. GONE! I was gut-punched. I lost my mind. My friend was sympathetic and understanding about my freakout. I called the hotel immediately. Someone else had already checked into room 2208 unfortunately. Yes sir, we sent someone up there to knock on the door but no one answered. We left them a voice mail on the hotel phone (my God, who would check that?) Yes sir, we spoke to the head of housekeeping. No one has seen the shirts. Yes sir, I’m the manager, I’m sorry, we can’t locate the shirts. They are not in the room after the next group checked out. I called the hospitality planner for the event organization group we hired. She tried as well. I just didn’t know what else to do.

I was beside myself. I wanted to enjoy my weekend with my friend, and I did, so maybe that’s why I let it go. Maybe I could have insisted the hotel patch me through to the room. Maybe I should have pushed harder. Maybe I should have called the CEOs of Hilton, Hyatt, and Marriott. I don’t know. The shirts were gone, including the Bowie shirt from 1990. I hurt to this day. I hurt.

3. The Tiffany Flutes

OK, back to Part 1. Do you remember the Tiffany & Co. champagne flutes and the blue box? Let’s go back to those. There are typically little gifts in the VIP rooms at these conferences, I’ve noticed. Along with the chocolate strawberries my friendly but confused bellman was arranging, there was an Austin-themed bottle opener, a Barton Springs coaster, and a couple of other little knick-knacks. Remember that I didn’t spend much time in my room when I first arrived. I ate a strawberry, glanced at these little gifts, and scurried down to meet my colleagues.

Over drinks that night, we talked about the hotel, and the nice little gift bags we had been given. Most folks had some strawberries or other treats. There was a lovely card from the executive director of our organization, a coffee mug, and the other trinkets. I brought up the flutes. “Hey, and what about those champagne flutes? Am I crazy, those are Tiffany, right?” Everyone looked at me like I was nuts. The president of our board was mock-outraged: “I didn’t get any Tiffany flutes, goddammit!” Others of our group, much higher up on this food chain than me – including the conference chair herself – said the same. I felt a little sheepish.

I said well, I have some nice champagne flutes in a blue box. There was even a little card that said Welcome to Austin with them, although I hadn’t read it yet. We were all confused. I never brought it up again, but a few times later in the week one of my colleagues would say “Why did Chip get fancy champagne glasses?” I would pretend to take an important phone call and scurry away.

It’s hard packing up from these events when they are over. Not only do you collect a bunch of stuff along the way and wonder where to put it all, but it’s always a frantic rush to the airport, thus the missing T-shirts. I knew I wanted to keep the Tiffany flutes, but I had nowhere to put that blue shoe box they came in. The conference even gives you little backpacks to carry your stuff around in, but the box wouldn’t even fit in that. I had two rolling suitcases and a good-sized travel backpack already, but there was nowhere to put this damned box! (Remember I had brought my scale as well.)

My dumb solution was to remove the flutes from the beautiful box they came in, wrap them in the bubble wrap that also came with them, put them and them alone in the small conference backpack that was provided to us, and dangle that small backpack off my main backpack with a carabiner. Every flight was a hassle; I was constantly worried about the glasses breaking, and I must have looked a fool to my friend waiting for me at my next destination on the East Coast, rolling two suitcases, and with a small backpack dangling off my larger backpack.

Finally at home in Sacramento after an exhausting conference in Austin and a whirlwind long weekend on the East Coast, as I began unpacking, I wondered again about the glasses. (I also saw that on eBay, just the Tiffany & Co. extra boxes could sell for $25.00 or so, like the one I left behind in the hotel room.) I found a home for the flutes in my cupboard, and eventually came across the card that came with them:

I know I’m being a little vague about the conference, and that’s to protect the reputations of the innocent bystanders in the various sagas and predicaments I’ve found myself in at that place over the years. But I will say this: It was not for Ford dealers. Not from Houston, not from anywhere. Nor any other kind of car. I didn’t win the Fall Sales Challenge. I don’t sell anything. It was a mistake. Someone gave me Tiffany & Co. champagne flutes by mistake.

For the record, as God as my witness, I would have returned them to the hotel had I known. I would have tried to find out about the Ford dealers gathering that must have been occurring in some other part of the hotel. I would hate to be the one Ford dealer who sat around with his or her crew, maybe at the very same bar I sat around in with my crew, saying “Wait, all of you received WHAT? I didn’t get any!” God bless you, Houston area Ford dealer, wherever you are. I’ll make you a deal: you find my T-shirts, I’ll return the flutes.