Not a Nice Hotel

In San Diego to work with military linguists, my colleague and I checked into a hotel and ordered a 5 a.m. wake-up call. The next morning, the phone didn’t ring until 5:30. “You were supposed to call us at 5 a.m.!” I admonished the desk clerk on the other end of the line. “What if I had to close a ­million-dollar contract this morning? Your oversight would have cost me the deal!” “Sir,” he said calmly, “if you had to close that type of deal, I doubt you’d be staying in this type of hotel.”