This didn't go according to plan
Thursday, January 14, 2010 at 10:39AM 
When I was in my mid-20's and a year or two after I met my wife, Heather, we took our first weekend trip together.
The destination was Miami, the event was the Ultra Music Festival, and the hotel I selected via the Internet was called the Everglades.
The Everglades looked liked your typical 4-star, clean and modern hotel in a major city.
The rate was reasonable and the location was perfect for our purpose; it was located right across from Bayfront Park where the music festival was happening.
Writing this now I should have been tipped off by the name.
Who the f&*k wants to stay in a hotel named after a swamp swarming with bat sized mosquitoes and 20 foot alligators?
So, we pull up to this hotel for our first fun-filled romantic weekend away together and it looks pretty well fine from the outside.
I walk in, step up to the reception desk and check us in to a room located on the 13th floor.
No problems so far, right?
Wrong.
I get back to the car where my wife (at that time she was my new girlfriend) is waiting and she looks a little shaken up.
"What happened?" I asked her.
"Some scary old lady tried to get in the car with me. I had to lock all the doors and shoo her away."
"Freaky" I said.
Then I handed her our room key.
It was held in a small folder with the room number written on it.
Immediately my wife noticed the floor number and asked me, "How is our room on the 13th floor?"
"What do you mean?" I asked.
"Hotels don't have 13th floors" she said.
"Well this one does," I said.
Now things get really interesting.
We walk into our room and take in our surroundings and here's what we find:
The only artwork on the walls is a laminated photograph of a head of cabbage on a blood red background, laminated, and bolted to the wall (Why? I have no idea. Who the f&*k would steal such a thing?)
The bed has no comforter, only a thin beige blanket with several small holes and one large clump of unidentified hair.
There is a bleached out red stain on the carpet just beside the bed and you can just imagine what we thought that was.
The shower curtain in the bathroom had hair all over it and the pipes running to the toilet were totally exposed with green whatever all over them.
We were just waiting for the rats and roaches to engulf us and the axe murderer to come through the door at any moment.
This place was creeeeepy.
Needless to say we were out of there...fast.
At the reception I fervently demanded my money back using false advertising as my reason in regards to the obviously doctored and misleading pictures on the website.
Finally, I settled with the manager to pay for half of one night just so that we could get the hell out of there.
Fortunately we found a very nice Marriott just around the corner that even gave us a special rate because we checked in so late which made up the difference that I had to pay the manager at the freaky hotel.
We ended up having a great weekend and came away with a great, comical story to tell over and over.
The reason I told you this story is to illustrate that life doesn't always go according to plan.
You don't always get what you see or what you think you've seen or what some slick marketer has persuaded you to believe you've seen.
Life will not go according to your plan and you have to be prepared for it with plans B, C, D, etc.
Perhaps this is a stretch but you could say that your life circumstances today are the sum total of how you've reacted to everything that's happened to you, or that hasn't gone according to plan, up to this moment in time.
It is worth your time to take a close look at this.
Just take out a piece of paper and consider the various aspects of your life: health, family, career, finance, friends, etc.
Look at where you are in each one of these aspects and ask yourself how you got here (write it down).
What were the decisions, turning points, or reactions to events that got you to where you are today in each aspect of your life?
Doing this can reveal all manner of valuable intelligence about yourself, your tendencies, your strengths and weaknesses, damaging or empowering behaviors, etc.
This is most valuable if you're somewhere you don't want to be in one or more aspects of your life.
If you know what's gotten you here, you can damn well figure out what actions you took that got you here and then define a new set of actions or behaviors that will get you a different result.
Pretty cool, huh?
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