When I travel I generally stay at a Holiday Inn Express or a Hampton Inn. They're not great, they're generic business traveler hotels and they have free breakfast. So I'm in Pittsburgh, and the Hampton Inn I stayed at last time I was here isn't available. So I grab the Holiday Inn Express. Let me run down my experience across slightly more than one day:

1. Arrive. Stand at front desk talking to coworker for 5 minutes. No service. Fill out the "I'm parking here, this is what kind of car I have" form. Wait. Cough. Make noise. Get bored. Oh, there's the girl. She was too busy talking to the other girl around the corner, didn't know we were there.

2. Get up to room. key doesn't work. Back to front desk for new key.

3. Get up to room. It's a smoking room. Smells like awful. Back to front desk. "Sorry sir, we only have smoking rooms available." Back to room. Check on other hotels in the area. None nearby have rooms available.

4. Manage to sleep okay. Go work. Come back. Go eat. Come back. Watching TV and I hear drip............ drip.......... drip drip....... drip drip drip drip drip drip drip drip... Must be the shower. Oh no. That's coming from the ceiling of the bathroom. The floor is soaked.

5. Call the front desk (11:00 PM). "Sorry, we don't have any maintenance available." Inform them that it's really dripping a lot. Repeat: the floor is soaked. "We'll send someone up in the morning." Become angry, ask the fellow for verification that my bathroom is going to be flooded all night. "You can ask a manager in the morning about compensation." Slam phone down in anger.

6. The night rent-a-cop security guy brings me a towel up. I don't need a towel, I need the fucking leak fixed. But he seems genuinely concerned, "Oh jeez, that's really coming in. I'll go check upstairs." I hear him radio the front desk. They repeat to him that it'll just have to wait til morning.

7. Security guy comes back with a bucket and informs me that the upstairs toilet is broken. I guess demolished? Like, ripped out of the floor or something? 'Cause damn, that's a lot of water. He said the people in that room were sleeping, had no idea.

So the guy who's not even a real employee is the one who helped me the most by giving me a bucket and apologizing like mad. The douchebag at the front desk, if he said "sorry" at all, just sounded pissed that I was bothering him. And I can't even go sit on the damn toilet because I'll have the upstairs room's toilet water dripping on me.

What hotel doesn't have 24-hour maintenance? I mean, people are AT THE HOTEL AT NIGHT. During the day, who cares, people are out and about. But everyone is HERE at NIGHT. Should be sleeping, not throwing towels down to try to make the flooded bathroom usable. Fucking unbelievable...

So never every stay at the Holiday Inn Express on Tenth street in Pittsburgh. Just in case you were planning a trip, stay anywhere else but there.