Never be a free-rider
I spent my Thanksgiving week in Florida. It is definitely the most unforgettable trip in my life because I fell for a well-designed prank on the very first day.
After I arrived Orlando airport, my friends Marcus and Josh picked me up as they started the trip 3 days earlier. Marcus then drove 3 hours to St Augustine. It is a nice town with a surprisingly long history behind. The town was founded centuries before the independence of the United States. It was served as the capital of the Spanish Florida. After we stayed there for couple hours, my friend took another 3 hours to drive back to Orlando. I didn’t sleep enough on the day before so I fell asleep quickly in the car. When I woke up, we almost arrived our hotel. Honestly, I didn’t know which hotel I was going to stay as I wasn’t involved too much during the trip planning process. I trusted my friends would do a great job on that. The following was the hotel with a sketchy name, Super 8. Not the right one! Actually, I was perfectly fine to stay in the hotel on the left as long as the room was hygienic enough.
Everything still looked pretty good until we got off from the car. Marcus and Josh told me they forgot the room number. I followed them to walk around the entire hotel until they recalled the correct location of the room. Then, they couldn’t open the door by using the key card. They gave the card to me for another attempt but in vain. We walked back to our car as Marcus needed to drive the car to a designated spot before 10 pm to return it back to the owner. The place was quite far away so we called Uber to take us back to Super 8.
Strangely, the Uber driver dropped us off outside another hotel Crowne Plaza. Marcus said he couldn’t select Super 8 as the destination so he just chose the nearest spot. Josh found out that it would take more than half an hour to walk back to Super 8 if we walked along the pedestrian walkway. Instead, he suggested we should take a shortcut to go through the forest to save 15 minutes. I doubted whether it was a wise choice to walk into the forest at night. Josh then proposed to stay in Crowne Plaza as we couldn’t enter the room in Super 8 and he didn’t want to walk anymore. I thought it was ridiculous to pay for another hotel because of getting too tired to walk for 30 minutes. I asked Marcus to call Super 8 to fix the key card issue before we headed back but they replied the repairing guy had already left the office. They asked us to rent another hotel for that night and would offer us a refund as well.
The whole thing was so weird but I couldn’t tell what was the problem. Josh said we should look around the hotel before paying it. We then went up to 12th floor to take a look at the view outside the hotel. Suddenly, Josh opened the door of a room with all their belongings put inside.
What happened? Marcus and Josh knew I had no clue about where I would stay so they planed this prank while I was sleeping in the car heading back from St Augustine to Orland. Now you know how to penalize a free-rider who knows nothing about the entire process!
