“I enjoyed your story about your daughter’s passport but kept thinking, huh, that’s nothing. Imagine moving to another country with a toddler and a newborn, whose passports you carefully applied for the week each was born (two passports each, British and American — they have dual nationality). By the time you have finished packing up the house and seen the moving van and your husband off to France, you are a crazed zombie from lack of sleep and stress and are looking forward to one full day of nothing to do but nurse the baby before you fly to France yourself. That night, just before you drop off to sleep exhausted on the mattress on your soon-to-be-former neighbor’s floor, you bolt upright in a panic. The file cabinet! With the passports in it! It’s on the ferry to Calais!

“Fortunately the children’s British passports had not yet been picked up from the passport office, but I was forced to spend my day of rest getting my picture taken (the worst photo of me ever) and begging, finally breaking down and sobbing, baby in a sling on my chest, at the American Embassy in London so they would relent and give me a passport right then and NOT make me come all the way back the next day. (In fact, all my acceptable photo IDs were in that file cabinet too — they wanted to check me out with the State Department first.)

“I ended up getting a replacement passport that was good for six months, but after that I would have to renew it in person at a consulate or embassy in France. Six months later, when I had to travel five hours by train to Bordeaux with a six-month-old baby, I wished I had gone back the next day.

“P.S. On a trip to India, my sister left her passport in a bank when she changed money. Two days later she and her boyfriend paid a taxi driver to drive them hundreds of miles back to that city, a terrifying six-hour drive during which the driver flung coins out the window at every Hindu shrine they passed to ensure they survived the trip. After they arrived at the bank, the driver was regaling the other taxi drivers with the tales of this mad excursion. My sister came out and held up her American passport to show him why they’d come all the way back. He looked like he’d just been told that he’d helped find the Holy Grail.”

This next letter presents one way you do not want to start your married life.

“My new husband and I were very excited to go on our honeymoon to Club Med in Tahiti. Our flight didn’t leave until midnight Saturday, so I didn’t even bother packing until that day (after all, you don’t need much more than a swimsuit and sunscreen for Tahiti). We went out to breakfast, and then I happily commenced packing. I unlocked my fireproof safe to get out our passports. (You don’t need a visa to go to Tahiti, just passports.) There was only one passport in the safe — his. In a flash I realized the awful truth: My passport was in my safe deposit box, locked in my bank, which was closed on Saturdays. Tears followed soon after — I had ruined our honeymoon! I called the bank’s 800 number and begged them to open the bank, but they said the locks were on a timer and there was nothing they could do. I tried everything, even calling the American embassy in Tijuana to see whether I could drive down there (from San Diego) and get a temporary replacement.

“To make a long story short, we had to postpone our trip by four days and it ended up costing us an extra $1,000 since we had to go business class instead of coach. We had a great time anyway, and my husband was very sweet about the whole thing, so all’s well that ends well. But I’ll never leave important details like that until the last minute again.”

You know how some supposed technological advancements are really small steps backward for mankind? Here’s a letter about one of those annoying little advancements. I suspect many of you will relate all too well to this one — I know I’ve been there.

“On my first trip to New York City, I was staying at the new Hotel Giraffe on Park Avenue. This was a different experience from other hotels in which I have stayed in the U.S. The staff was very friendly and the view was all I could have hoped for on my budget. The hotel had no restaurant or cafe, but there were eight restaurants within a block. And since this was New York City, many of them were open later than I could have hoped for. There was even a deli that delivered to the hotel, with all the special New York-type food a boy from Seattle could want. I enjoy having a cold glass of diet soda on hand and, it being August, my girlfriend needed her bottled water. These were easy to get, but the only place to keep them cool in the room was the honor bar.

“Which brings me to my stupid hotel trick: This hotel opened in December of last year and was fully equipped with all the newest hotel computer-type stuff. This included, to my great surprise at checkout time, a computerized honor bar. It seems that any time you removed or even moved any of the beverages in the honor bar — bingo! — it sent a message to the hotel billing computer to charge you for the beverage that had been in that space. Well, we had stayed at the hotel for four days and several times had taken beverages out of the honor bar and placed them on the counter so that we could place our own store-bought beverages in the bar to keep them cool. When we were leaving, we once again placed the items that were originally in the honor bar back in place.

“At checkout we were presented with an honor bar bill of three pages that came to $478! None of which we had consumed. The hotel was nice enough to accept our explanation (we can only imagine that this has happened to many of their other guests) and zeroed out the total for the honor bar. They could not, however, remove the listings for these items from the bill printout.

“Did I mention that I was staying in the room as a tag-along on my girlfriend’s business expense account? Even though she ended up not paying for it, she was still left to explain on her expense report why she had $478 of beer, wine and liquor on her honor bar bill for a business trip of four days.”

Now here’s a series of STTs that seem variations on the same timeless theme: Love makes fools of us all.

“I was in the last stages of a bad marriage and had decided to take a solo trip to Mexico to think things through. I was heading to a spot frequented by a number of our friends. A week before I left I found out that a single woman from our circle of friends was also planning a trip to the area. I had always been attracted to this woman and took this news to be a sign from the gods. In fact, events took what many people later thought to be a predictable course; any second thoughts I had were soon swept away by the sheer fun of my first (and last) extramarital affair.

“One evening Margaret (not her name) laughingly offered me her ex-husband’s watch. She had brought it down for use when diving and since diving events were no longer on the schedule, she had no other use for it. Besides, she said, she had a hard time setting it.

“Not having a watch, I accepted the gift. I checked the date on the watch against my USA Today and put it in my pocket. It was easy to lose track of time, so I was happy to have an easy way to keep track of the date. I put the watch on my nightstand and checked it every morning so as not to miss my departure day.

“When that day came, Margaret drove me to the airport. She was going to stay on for a few more days, using the room I had originally rented just for myself. When I got to the ticket counter my head was swimming, not only from the overwhelming experience but also trying to think about all the implications for my return home.

“For a while I failed to notice the ticket agent’s increasing consternation. He scanned the passenger log repeatedly, then retrieved other papers. Finally he said with great annoyance, ‘You missed your flight — it was yesterday!’ I was shocked. I was a day late! Twenty-four hours of extra dalliance while my employer, clients and especially my wife wondered what the hell had happened to me.

“I’ll spare you the gory details, the most grisly of which was the phone call from my soon-to-be ex-wife to my hotel room, answered by — you guessed it. Suffice it to say that a huge palaver ensued — all caused by one tiny detail. As I stood in the standby line waiting to get on the flight, I realized what had happened. Indeed, Margaret had had trouble setting that watch. If I had looked closely at the face I would have noticed an AM where the PM should have been. The watch was set 12 hours slow, enough for the time to appear accurate, and for the date to be correct in the evening, but not in the mornings when I checked it.”

Ever indulged in a little phone-play on the road? Well, here’s a cautionary tale:

“I’m an attorney with a high-status position in state government. Young. Thirty-one. Female. Married. With a long-distance lover (who is not my husband). I went to a conference a couple of years ago and had arranged for a phone tryst with my lover. (We don’t get to see each other but once or twice a year, so we maintain daily phone and e-mail contact. But since we are both married, the opportunities to really talk openly are few and far between. The night before this conference was one of those rare occasions.)

“I’d geared all the way up for this phone date. I’d driven two hours to the hotel where the conference was being held. I inquired about the location of a good takeout sushi place and a liquor store. I ran my errands to gather my feast, then relaxed in a lovely bubble bath to soak away the stresses of that day’s court. I’d eaten my sushi and lit tiny votive candles around the room. I put my long hair up in a loose chignon and lowered myself into the water. There, I sipped my first, then second glass of wine from the spotted bathroom glass while bathing, then donned my sexiest nightgown in preparation for my lover’s voice.

“I slipped between the crisp white hotel sheets and excitedly dialed his number. (As an aside, you should know that I was paying for the room and the charges out-of-pocket). Being the inexperienced traveler that I am, I reasoned that the anonymity of charging the phone call to the room was preferable to having to explain a strange calling card charge to either my husband or employer. It was quite late at night in order to allow for the three-hour difference between my East Coast locale and my lover’s California time.

“The conversation was slow and languorous. It was going to my head almost as much as those third and fourth glasses of wine. One thing led to another, and, well, let’s just say that there came a point in the conversation when I’d been sated in every way. Boy, did that big hotel bed feel great after that dinner, and bath, and wine, and …

“I woke to the alarm the next morning at 6:30 a.m., light streaming in through the curtains, phone still in hand. I put the receiver to my ear and listened, but there was no sound — no dial tone or voice — at the other end. I was a little embarrassed to realize that I’d fallen asleep while on the phone with my lover. I laughed thinking how much he was going to razz me next time I talked to him. I knew I’d have to pay for that transgression. And boy, did I ever.

“I placed the receiver back in its cradle and went to the conference, slightly amused about the previous night’s events. That is, until I went to check out of the hotel.

“We all know that a six-minute long-distance phone call can cost upwards of $10 when charged to the room. But did you know that a six-hour phone call can cost over $500? The clerk handed me the bill and I nearly fell down. What could I say? ‘Gee, Miss, I hate to bother you, but this charge is bogus. You see, I was having phone sex with my boyfriend and I fell asleep during the conversation. I wasn’t really talking all that time. The phone was just off the hook.’ Her pasted-on smile stared back at me as I looked up at her over my bill. My mind started racing through plausible explanations.

“I gulped and took the plunge anyway, fearful of the repercussions if I had to eat that call on my credit card. How in the world could I explain such a huge bill to my poor, unsuspecting husband?

“Ultimately, I confessed only to drinking a bottle of wine and falling asleep while on the phone. I clarified that the other party had disconnected once they heard me snoring (true) and that I’d awakened with the phone in hand (also true). With a sweet smile that did a lot to belie my profession, I calmly argued that the call should have terminated once the other party hung up. Therefore I should not have been charged past that point. (Yeah, yeah, it’s the big, bad hotel’s fault.)

“Could I estimate just how long I was engaged in legitimate conversation?” inquired the perky front desk assistant manager. Hmmm, let’s see. I made a mental tally: “Hi, honey, how was your day? I’m a little tipsy, what are you wearing? I miss you like hell, hey … where are your hands right now? Oh, baby … mmmmmmm, god I love you … zzzzzzzzzzzzz.” I’d guess — half an hour?

“She recalculated the charges accordingly and I sheepishly paid my bill, in cash.

“Next time I’m getting a pre-paid calling card.”

If you work in the travel industry, you’ve no doubt come across some stupendous STTs in your time. To end this week’s compendium of travelers’ travails, here are two tales from the other side of the travel desk:

“I was working the front desk at a Best Western in Albuquerque, N.M. I answered the phone, and a woman asked to be connected to room 7. Problem: We didn’t have a room 7. So she asked for a specific name, but when I checked the list of guests, that name wasn’t on it.

“‘Well, that can’t be. My husband left a message with this number saying he was in room 7. Could it be room 107 or 207? Could you ring one of those for me?’ But he definitely wasn’t in room 107 or 207, and I wasn’t going to put her call through to someone who I knew wasn’t in our hotel. She repeated, ‘This is impossible, my husband left a message saying he was in room 7 at the Best Western in Alamogordo.’

“‘Um, ma’am, this is Albuquerque.’

“She was insistent: ‘No, this is Alamogordo.’

“‘Lady, if I was in Alamogordo, I’d know it. And I’d be trying to get out. I can get you the number for the Best Western in Alamogordo, and maybe he’s there.’ I gave her the number, but she called back a few minutes later saying that was no good, was I sure he wasn’t at our hotel and could I put her through to room 107? I declined, because the guest in room 107 had been there a couple of days and I knew it wasn’t her husband.

“She called back a few minutes later and didn’t identify herself, just asked to be put through to 107. Fine, I put the call through, let the person in the room confirm that it wasn’t her husband. I never found out what the story was, but either her husband was really confused or was trying to ditch his wife.”

Here’s another tale:

“I work as a train conductor for a commuter railroad in the Northeast. This STT was committed by one of our passengers a few years ago and I still can’t get over it.

“A middle-aged woman boarded my train early on a Saturday morning and was obviously drunk. After she was on for a while she decided she wanted to smoke and proceeded to light up a cigarette right in the car in total disregard of all the ‘No Smoking’ signs. We told her to put the cigarette out, but a little later she did it again. We knew she had been drinking, so we tried to show her some mercy and gave her still another chance to behave.

“For a while everything was fine, but then a passenger ran up to me and told me there was a woman stuck in one of the bathrooms. As soon as I entered the car, I could hear her yelling from inside the bathroom. It turned out that she went into the bathroom to sneak a smoke. After she locked herself in, she pulled out her lighter and put the cigarette in her mouth, but before she could get it lit, she dropped the lighter down the toilet. Undaunted, she reached down to fetch it and got her hand stuck in the bowl.

“The doors on the bathrooms opened inward and the compartment was very small. We were able to get her to unlock the door but we couldn’t get in because her butt was blocking the door from opening enough. We had to stop the train, put the rest of the passengers on another train and wait for help to arrive. Finally the police, along with some company mechanics, showed up. They had to disassemble the walls of the bathroom to get her out. There she was, about 20 minutes later after the walls came down, all bent over the toilet with her arm stuck. I wonder if the redness in her face was from being bent over or from the embarrassment?”

That’s it for this week. But I know some of you out there still have some great tales you haven’t shared. Now it’s your turn. Tell me your favorite stupid traveler trick — and look for more tales here in weeks to come.

But I promised that if you told me your worst stupid traveler trick, I’d tell you mine. More than 100 of you fulfilled your part of the bargain, so now it’s my turn to share my most stupid traveler trick of all.

The year was 1987. It was a tumultuous and exhilarating time in my life. The previous August, our daughter, Jenny, our first child, had come into the world. And on Jan. 1, I had been named travel editor at the San Francisco Examiner under the newly revitalized and robust regime of publisher Will Hearst. It was a heady time.

Early that year, I had been invited in my new role to attend the annual April conference of the Pacific Asia Travel Association, a grand gathering of travel poobahs — heads of airlines, hotel chains, national government tourism organizations, travel agencies and tour operators.

I was especially excited because the conference host country that year was Japan, a country that held a special significance for me. After graduate school I had lived, taught and worked as a TV talk show host in Japan for two years. And at the university where I had taught, I had met the woman who would become my wife. So I gleefully accepted the PATA invitation and made preparations to take the whole family triumphantly back on my first official trip as travel editor.

In the weeks leading up to the conference, I made a packing list and checked it twice and thrice. This was our first international trip with our daughter, so I was especially concerned about anticipating everything we might need for her — diapers and wipes, dozens of changes of clothing, powdered formula and plastic scoops for measuring it, bottles and bottle holders, brushes for cleaning the bottles, nipples and more nipples, burping towels and sleeping-on-the-shoulder towels and cleaning-up-throw-up towels. I also checked that my passport was still valid and that my wife’s Japanese passport was valid and had her U.S. green card in it. All was in order.

The travel editor is a relatively big fish in the lake of Bay Area tourism, and so various local Japanese tourism officials were also excited that I had become editor and that I was embarking on my first official trip to Japan. As a result, when the time came for our fateful departure, quite a congregation of these officials and their staff people were waiting for us at the airport. We were flying on Japan Airlines, so the director and managers of the local branch of the airline were there, as was a sizable team from the local office of the Japan National Tourist Organization. Officials from a few other agencies were there too, just to swell the ranks.

When we walked into the airport and saw all these people waiting for us, we were surprised and embarrassed, but I must admit that I also felt pleased and even somewhat kingly, as if a thick red carpet had been luxuriantly unfurled for us across the airport floor. We strode up and greeted the crowds, shaking innumerable hands and bowing innumerable times and thanking everyone for taking the trouble to come to the airport to see us off.

Then, after a few more exchanges of pleasantries and good wishes, the time came to check in.

As staff people whisked our check-in luggage away, the district director for Japan Airlines escorted me to a ticket counter that seemed to have been set up exclusively for us and bowed me into the hands of the ticket agent, who — as I read on her nameplate — was actually the supervisor of JAL ticket agents at the airport. Mustering as much ceremonial dignity as I could, I bowed and presented our tickets to her with both hands, like precious Buddhist texts. She took them, bowed, smiled and leafed through them efficiently. All was in order.

“Now may I have your passports, please?” she asked in crisp English. I produced my wife’s red Japanese passport with the green card tucked securely inside and my own true blue U.S. passport and again offered them with both hands and a slight bow.

She looked through them and smiled and returned them to me — and then the universe suddenly derailed and the airport turned upside-down and I fell though life’s rabbit hole.

“And now may I see your daughter’s passport, please?” she asked with the sweetest smile imaginable.

Time stopped. My heart stopped. The planet momentarily stopped spinning. In the next second, a million different things slammed through my brain — all the people waiting expectantly around me, all the appointments and deadlines I had missed in my life, all the important things I had ever forgotten. Nothing stuck. Nothing cohered. I felt the blood rush to my head. I felt a metallic taste fill my mouth. I felt like I was going to faint.

“My — daughter’s — passport?” I said, as though learning a new language.

“Yes, your daughter needs a passport to travel also.”

“But,” I thought to myself, “my daughter’s only 8 months old. All she does is nurse and throw up and cry and sleep and goo-goo once in a while. It’s unthinkable that she would need a passport. What’s she going to do — run off to Tahiti? What could she possibly need a passport for? She can’t even sign her name. She can’t even change money. She’s hardly a person at all.”

What I said was, “My daughter needs a passport?”

The ticket agent, still very sweetly, said, “Yes, all people need a passport, regardless of their age.”

“Oh, I didn’t realize that.”

I was like some prehistoric beast caught in a tar pit; the more I struggled, the deeper I sank.

The circles of confused concern emanating from me rippled through the crowd of dignitaries. “What’s happening?” I was sure they were whispering. “Why is it taking so long?” “Has something gone wrong?” “What could possibly be transpiring at the ticket agent’s desk?”

The district manager for Japan Airlines came rushing over.

“Is anything the matter?” he asked, anxiety creasing his brow.

“Um, well, yes, actually. I don’t have a passport for my daughter.”

“You left it at your home?”

“Well, actually, no, I, uh, I didn’t realize I needed a passport for her.”

Only the faintest trace of incredulity crossed his face before he said, “Ah, I see. You have no passport for your daughter.” He paused, brow furrowed in concentration. “But your daughter cannot fly to Japan without a passport.”

“Is there anything I can do?” I asked.

“Well, you have to get a passport for your daughter.”

“Can I do that at the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo?”

“No, you cannot board the airplane without it. You have to get it at the passport agency in San Francisco.”

By now the head of the Japan National Tourist Organization had joined the discussion. “You don’t have a passport for your daughter?” he asked, trying to disguise his astonishment.

“That’s right,” I said grimly, feeling a miserable cocktail of embarrassment, guilt, stupidity, humiliation and other unsavory ingredients course through my veins.

“I can give you a ride to the passport agency,” he said.

My mind at this point was reeling with a kind of desperate clarity. I had interviewed the head of the passport agency a month earlier for a column about passports. Maybe I could explain the circumstances and ask him to conjure a miracle. I looked at my watch — two-and-a-half hours till takeoff. I raced through the calculations: Even if the traffic were preposterously light, it would still take 45 minutes to get to the passport office and 45 minutes to get back to the airport. I would have to accomplish the whole passport process in one hour.

I had about as much hope of inventing a time machine in an hour.

The inevitable had already dawned on the faces around me. “I’m so very, very sorry,” I said. “I’m so sorry, I can’t believe I did this. Is there any way we can fly to Japan tomorrow?”

The JAL manager was already behind the counter, punching and prodding a keyboard. “We have seats available on tomorrow’s flight,” he said with a relieved smile. “I will reserve them for you right now.”

I heaved a huge sigh, then realized I had to explain the situation to the intensely curious crowd of well-wishers who were waiting for us to move on to the departure gate so they could bow and wave us off safely and then get on with whatever they really wanted to be doing that day.

I approached them. “I’m very, very sorry,” I said. “I’m afraid I didn’t realize that my daughter needed a passport. Thank you all so very much for your trouble, but we won’t be flying to Japan today. We have to get a passport and we will be flying tomorrow. Thank you again for coming to see us off. We really appreciate your kindness.” And then I took out a shovel and dug a deep pit right there in the airport floor and climbed in and curled into a little ball and rocked and rocked and rocked until everyone went away …

No, I didn’t. I bowed as deeply as I could to everyone, remembering those samurai films where the dishonored samurai takes out his sword and plunges it deep into his gut. But then, instead of beheading me, one of them kindly said, “Oh, that’s all right, it’s a mistake anyone could make,” and then another smiled and said, “Get a good night’s sleep and have a safe trip tomorrow,” and they all smiled kindly and told me to take care and dispersed as quickly and graciously as a spring breeze.

Then I went over to where my wife was blissfully bouncing my daughter, oblivious to the disaster unfolding. “Honey,” I said, “I don’t know how to tell you this, but — Jenny needs a passport. There’s no way we can get it before the plane leaves. Our best hope is to get the passport this afternoon and fly out tomorrow. They’ve already reserved seats for us on tomorrow’s flight.”

To her eternal credit, she blinked for a few seconds while absorbing this information, then said simply, “OK, let’s go.”

We gathered up all our bags and then I called the director of the passport office from the airport, explained the whole miserable situation, dropped on my figurative knees and asked if there was any way I could get the passport that afternoon so we could leave tomorrow and I could just make the ceremonial opening of the conference. He said that if we drove to the agency right away and processed the papers immediately, he would put the application in as a superrush and would do his best to get it to me by the end of the afternoon. He also made it clear that this was a once-in-a-lifetime dispensation. (As you well know, dear readers, under the smoothest circumstances the normal passport process takes at least a week — by which time the conference would be history.)

Well, we hustled our bags and our bodies into a cab and flew to the passport agency, picked up all the papers and ran to a nearby photo shop, where we had Jenny’s picture taken. I filled out the forms while we waited for the pictures to be developed, then sprinted back to the passport office, where the director personally took our papers and disappeared.

Kuniko and Jenny took a cab home and I waited like a restless father in a maternity ward, pacing back and forth, back and forth, glancing at the clock, trying futilely to read the newspaper or the novel I had packed for the plane, reviewing for the one-millionth time my unbelievable ignorance and carelessness and stupidity and vowing that if we got the passport in time, I would never, ever, ever say anything unkind about passport agencies.

Finally, at about five minutes to closing time, the director emerged with a big smile on his face, waving a little blue bundle in his hands. “I’ve got your daughter’s passport,” he said.

After my 12th thank you, he made me get up off the floor and sent me toward the elevator, passport clutched in hand, with a cheery, “Have a good trip!”

The next day at the airport, there was no one to see us off. We waited anonymously in line until our time came, when I handed our tickets to the ticket clerk, who scanned them and said, “Can I see your passports, please?”

I gingerly handed over my wife’s passport and my own, and then my daughter’s shiny, pristine treasure.

The agent leafed through them all and said, “So this is your daughter’s first trip abroad?”

“Yes, it certainly is,” I said, and she smiled and handed all the tickets and passports back and told us where the gate was. As our bags were being conveyed away, I noticed the supervisor peering at us from a back office, smiling. She gave a little knowing wave, and we were on our way.

The happy ending was that the hotel took pity on me and waived the charges for all the calls made while I was out of the room — more than 70 $1-service-charge calls in all!

At the end of my column, I invited readers to share their own stupid traveler tricks — and more than 50 of you responded. Thank you, thank you — I no longer feel alone!

So this week I am going to share the best (or the worst, depending on your point of view) of these letters.

But to begin, I should — as a number of readers pointed out — name the hotel that generously and graciously waived my phone charges: It was Le Meridien Beverly Hills, and if you happen to stay there, please give the good people at the front desk my regards.

Speaking of the good people at the front desk, one reader e-mailed me a very good question:

“Did you tip the lady at the desk? You know, the one who actually got you off the hook for all the phone calls? Forgot her, didn’t you? Profuse thanks are nice, but she’s not making much more than the bellboy in salary, you know.”

I’m sorry to say I didn’t tip her anything — does anyone ever tip front desk clerks? It never occurred to me. Do front desk people really make about the same as bellboys? Would it have been appropriate to tip her in this case?

- – - – - – - – - – - -

Another reader sent a question-provoking note of another kind:

“Not wishing to insult you, but I think it’s a very silly thing to leave a $3,000 laptop in a hotel room while you go out for a meal — even if the maid looks trustworthy, her son may be a drug addict.”

When I’m staying in a hotel and working on my laptop, I always leave it out on my desk, and once in a while I do have second thoughts about this. After all, I always take pains to put my wallet out of sight, yet I leave my laptop — which is worth a lot more than my wallet — in the open on my desk, as if with a little “Help yourself” sign on it. Is this stupid? Do you always religiously tuck your laptop away somewhere safe? Where? It won’t fit in the in-room safe. Do you lock it in your luggage? Stuff it at the bottom of your dirty-laundry bag?

A number of readers sent me tales of small-time silliness that helped me feel better about my own phone faux pas, especially the first one below:

“I returned home from a trip to New Orleans. Nothing untoward happened. In the middle of the next month, I got a phone bill for several hundred dollars; astonished, I started to review: all these calls to New Orleans, all after I had returned home.

“What happened? I had forgotten to reconfigure my e-mail account to my local number; so every time I called for my e-mail, I called New Orleans.

“In my defense, I didn’t realize that you had to reconfigure the account in two places, I had done only one. I paid the bill.”

————

One reader described a trap even I haven’t fallen into:

“Once when staying at the San Francisco Fairmont for a two-week period, I made the poor decision to send my clothes out to be cleaned using the hotel’s laundry service. This included T-shirts, socks, undergarments, etc. Unfortunately, I neglected to pay attention to the cost of letting the hotel clean these items until they were returned the next day.

“When the bill arrived, I had spent over $100 on less than a week’s worth of cleaning. I had no dry cleaning — it was all laundry. They actually did a great job (my boxers were ironed!) but I was floored by the cost.”

————

Here’s an embarrassing bit of foolishness I too have fallen prey to, though not to this extent:

“A few weeks ago, after a long day of international travel, I checked into a hotel, received my electronic key card and went up to my room very excited about the prospect of going to sleep. I put in the key card and got a green light, but the door wouldn’t open. I tried again — same result. I tried reversing the card — not even a green light. Tried it again the right way — still couldn’t open the door.

“So I walked down to the house phone by the elevators, called the front desk and was told that someone would be up to help me promptly.

“I went down to the door and tried a couple of more times, just to make sure I wasn’t being stupid. Still couldn’t open the door.

“The desk clerk arrived, put in my key, got the green light and PUSHED the door open.”

————

As for this next reader’s tale, well, I suspect many of us have been there (though not, perhaps, in our underwear!):

“I never put room service trays outside the room anymore because of the following adventure in Denver a number of years ago. Picture this: nighttime, room service delivered and food eaten, I’m in my sleep T-shirt and panties. I decide to be a good guest and put the tray outside the door around 9 p.m. or so. I want to make sure it’s placed just so. I lean out a little too far and hear the click of the door closing behind me.

“What to do? No hallway phones, of course. So I can’t call the desk.

“I knock on some adjacent doors. No answer. I go to the elevator and push the down button. I try to conceal myself — no ficus trees, drat! When the elevator door opens, I lean into the opening — all male passengers, of course — and ask them if someone will tell the desk to send up someone to unlock my room, please. And they do.

“And the teenage bellboy has a new story to regale his co-workers with. *sigh*”

————

Now, here’s the opposite of the locked-out situation — a tale I must say I’ve never heard before:

“In 1966, I was a college senior on a job interview trip. The job was computer-related, but that’s where the connection ends. I checked into a quaint old hotel that had been renovated sometime in recent history. I had been living off campus and my room had an old-fashioned spring lock that used a cast-metal key. On a lark, I decided to see whether my key might fit the old lock on my hotel room door that had more recently been superseded by a modern lock.

“To my delight, the old lock reprised its forgotten role. Unfortunately, the action was not reversible.

“I called the desk seeking help. They no longer had the original keys and it was Sunday night in a small town, so no locksmith was available and no maintenance crew was on duty. I was locked in my room until the following morning!

“I was awakened by a phone call in the morning. Then a hammer and screwdriver were lowered to my window in a bucket from the room above mine. I removed the hinge pins from the door and a maintenance man pushed the door in from the outside. He then took the hammer to the door bolt and chided me for my foolishness. Finally, he rehung the door and I got on with my interview. (By the way, I didn’t get the job.)”

————

Here’s my second favorite of all the letters I received, the Case of the Mistaken Miller:

“I’m an engineer and about 10 years ago was doing a technology transfer with a company in Japan. Their people had been here a number of times and I went to visit them in Japan. Mr. Sato, whom I’d worked with here, was to pick me up at the airport. When I got to Narita, I didn’t see Mr. Sato but did see two gentlemen with a sign reading ‘Mr. Mark Miller’ (that’s my name).

“I said, ‘I’m Mark Miller. So, Mr. Sato couldn’t make it?’

“One of them replied, ‘No. Mr. Sato-san ask us come get you. You are Mark Miller, engineer from America to come fix machine of glass?’

“The machine I was there to support was a chemical recycler built of stainless steel and glass vessels, so it was, in fact, a machine of glass. I answered, ‘That’s me.’

“After a three-hour drive, hotel check-in and a shower and nap, we met to go for dinner, about five hours after I had landed. En route to the restaurant they asked some questions in their broken English (far better than my completely nonexistent Japanese) that made me realize something was very wrong.

“Yes. A different Mark Miller. A different Mr. Sato (sort of the Japanese equivalent of Miller). They were supposed to pick up a Mark Miller from a company in New Jersey whose flight arrived five minutes after mine did. He was there to work on a broken machine used in the manufacturing of glass.

“Meanwhile, Mr. Sato was still at Narita, phoning his boss every half-hour or so, looking for me, being told to check the bars, check with the police, check with customs and not to leave without me.

“After a few phone calls, all was set right — and I left with a story that I still love to tell.”

That’s a great tale, but this next one wins my own award for best stupid traveler trick of all:

“For Christmas one year, Virginia (my wife) and I flew from Los Angeles to Washington. Richard, my father-in-law, drove from New Jersey to Washington. All of us, including my brother’s family, my sister Janet and my mom, then drove to Myrtle Beach, S.C., for Christmas and subsequent family birthday celebrations.

“Sadly, the time comes to return to cubicles and civil service madness. On the appointed day, Janet and my mom pack up and leave. My brother’s family leaves. I look at the plane tickets for the 5,491st time. Departure time is 14:30. Richard agrees to hang around and take us to the airport. There isn’t much to do as it’s raining. Breakfast, coffee, desultory conversation. Not bad, all in all.

“At about 13:30, Richard drops us off at the airport. Hugs all around, a few sniffles from Virginia. Richard asks if we want him to wait around. This is critical. Now, I have already sowed the seeds of my disaster. My next move simply pours a ton of plant grow on them. ‘No,’ I say, ‘looks like we got it covered.’

“Richard drives away. Even now that phrase, even typing it, is painful. Richard drives away. Oh!

“Virginia and I invade the airport with enough luggage for a three-month Holiday on Ice tour. I march up to the counter, put the tickets down and announce we’re checking 54 bags. No one moves. No one offers to help. They don’t look at each other. Each one is staring at me as if they were pythons and I was a crippled, 200-pound chicken that dropped from the sky to land in front of them.

“Finally, one comes forward and looks at the ticket. She reads it, looks at me, reads it again. ‘You’re at the wrong airport,’ she says.

“Strange. Myrtle Beach has a lot of tourists, but enough for two airports? In any case, it’s getting close to departure time; we need to schlep the bags into a taxi and head for the other airport.

“‘Where’s the other airport?’ I ask.

“Suddenly it’s the twilight zone. Time slows down, becoming liquid. I’m transferred to a hyperaware state. I know, though she has only begun to open her mouth, what the agent is going to say. I hear it while her lips are still forming the first fricative sound. She’s going to say, ‘Raleigh-Durham, N.C.’

“‘Raleigh-Durham, N.C.,’ she says.

“Time resumes its normal pace. Virginia doesn’t understand … yet. I am struck silent. It’s impossible for me to be struck dumb. I have gone so far beyond merely ‘dumb’ that the Hubble Space Telescope can only see my outline out near the Horse’s A** nebula.

“Raleigh-Durham, N.C., is 190 miles from where I’m standing right now. I look at Virginia, who appears to be asking, ‘Could he really do something this dumb?’ I realize there is no way I can lay any of this off on her. After getting her OK on the proposed itinerary, I had handled all of the travel arrangements myself. Damn. About now, I figure, Richard is on the freeway on-ramp for I-75, which will take him northward, passing within 10 miles of the Raleigh-Durham airport.

“This, of course, was my original plan: Fly to D.C., drive to Myrtle Beach, drive to Raleigh-Durham (Richard has to pass it on his way home) and fly home. Flying out of Myrtle Beach is too expensive. Save a lot of money.

“Here we are with our tickets. Our flight is 192.7 miles away, scheduled to depart in 38 minutes. If a train leaves Chicago traveling at 45 mph …

“After we go through surprise, bewilderment, rage, sorrow, canceled checks, replay and sullen acceptance, we take stock of the situation. ‘Grim’ is feloniously accurate. 1) We’re not going home today. 2) How much is a flight to Raleigh-Durham? 3) $800, one-way, each. 4) Greyhound — twice a week, 16 hours one-way.

“All right, the answer is to rent a car one-way. I go to the Hertz desk and flash my Hertz Gold card, ask to rent a car. They don’t have any available. I get a little louder and insistent. They say they don’t have any cars. I stomp off.

“Virginia has been scoping out Avis. Since she is not 6-foot-3 and violent looking, she gets more cooperation. She has a story to tell. National Rent-A-Car, in preparation for the arrival of its new fleet of cars, has shipped the current fleet out. The new fleet has not arrived as planned. Seventy-year-old retirees in walkers have been slicing each other up with golf tees for a car. National has been hiring cab companies to transport their customers around. There are no cars.

“Normally this would be grist for my mill. I’d be in their faces, screaming, little spit bubbles flying out. But I have NO moral standing. I am ever so much more stupid than they are.

“Various avenues are explored to enhance the experience. In the end, we hire a cab to take us to Raleigh-Durham for $350. Upfront. Roy will take us. Roy looks like … Roy looks like a guy who hangs around the airport with a cab, waiting for whatever. He brings the cab around.

“I believe it was a Chevy, but at its age, that’s almost irrelevant. The light on top is broken. (I don’t want to think about how this happened.) The dents are as random and about as meaningful as the amount of chrome left on it. If the Dukes of Hazzard didn’t know how to fix cars and had to carry a lot of luggage, this would be their cab.

“We put the luggage in the back, trying to keep it away from the leak. Virginia gets in the back and lies down. This is my operation, she communicates. She has gone limp. I sit up front. We stop at several ATMs until I’m soaked and we find one that’s working. I get Roy’s money.

“As we drive through the pouring rain, I loudly and continuously talk. Roy smells just slightly of either second-rate after-shave or fourth-rate peach schnapps and seems comfortably relaxed. Heater? Maybe 15 years ago. Besides, dent bends in the doors have created a 20-decibel draft of cold, wet air. The radio does work. I learn many new facts about Jesus, such as: He had a crew cut, he knows when you are sleeping, he knows when you’re awake, he knows if you’ve been bad or good, so vote for school prayer for goodness’ sake. What with the wind howling through, the radio has to be really loud so you can distinguish what’s being said.

“Somewhere in this journey I reach the seventh circle of hell and begin to climb back to life. We arrive at the Holiday Inn just outside the Raleigh-Durham airport. This time, I don’t let the vehicle escape. At registration, the clerk says, ‘Gee, I don’t know what our availability is.’ Now I am the python. I slither across the desk and whisper, ‘Check,’ in the same voice Charles Manson uses at his parole hearings.

“We get a room. We pay off Roy, who helps us with the bags. I tip him well for spending over three hours listening to my opinions on e-mail, fluoridation, paged memory, real estate in Ventura County and my two dogs. He nods and leaves. It’s as if Roy left our baggage on the cart, but took our baggage (you know what I mean) with him. The rain stops. The restaurant has mercy and serves us leftovers. I can stand up straight for the first time in hours. My hearing recovers. I take a deep breath — the air is fresh, piney, cold.

“The next day we get up, shower, have breakfast, sit around, go to the airport and go home. As simple as that.

“It was not a learning experience. It isn’t something I look back on and laugh. There were only clouds, no silver lining. Except, maybe, one. Virginia never said a word about it. Then or later. To me or to anyone else. I owe her for that. I owe her big time for that.”

Thank you for this tale, Virginia’s husband — it doesn’t get much better than that!

And to all of you who sent me your stupid traveler tricks, thank you for reassuring me that I’m not the only stupid traveler in the universe. If any of the rest of you have tales you want to share, send them to me.

Now it’s my turn to share my favorite STTs: Come back next week for the painful-but-true Case of the Undocumented Daughter and the Dumbfounded Daddy.

One was some variation on an endless-redial theme, as in these e-mails:

“I think that the redial button was stuck on the phone, automatically redialing the same number until the next time the phone was used. Good guess?”

“The phone was trying to redial the last number you called automatically — a feature that is offered in some areas of L.A.”

“I think the hotel is using an AT&T service that automatically redials a busy number until you manually pick up the phone and dial another number.”

Essentially, most of these speculated that my last phone call before leaving for dinner had not gone through, thereby triggering an automatic-redialing service that would keep trying until the call was completed. This was a good guess, but wrong.

Others suggested that an automatically redialing fax was to blame:

“My guess is you tried to send a fax before you went to dinner. You left without realizing it hadn’t gone through (wrong number, whatever) but the machine diligently tried the number every five minutes until you returned and reclaimed the phone line to call your voice-mail.”

I especially liked this particular e-mail because it went on to describe a mistake even more horrific than my own phone faux pas:

“I heard of a family, on NPR I think, that had a fax. One of their daughters tried to send a fax to a wrong number right before the family went on vacation. No one noticed, and the fax machine worked away for 10 days while the family was vacationing, redialing the number every three minutes. Worse, the number wasn’t only wrong but very long distance as well. They have since cut back, possessing only an old dial telephone in the kitchen.”

An old dial telephone — that’s my kind of family!

Alas, while the fax scenario makes a certain kind of ineluctable sense to me, this also was not the case.

Three other notes merit special mention.

One reader wrote:

“There is a Nigerian group of ‘small-time’ terrorists who will call the hotel and using a special trick with phone numbers and the hotel’s main board will bounce off very expensive calls. Typically this is done by tricking the front desk clerk but can be done other ways — the titles on the bill match the calls you made, but that is also a trick made to hide long-distance calls. Most hotel managers are aware of these tricks but do not want to be stuck with the bill, since the latest method devised by the terrorists is very difficult to untangle. And no, I’m not nuts. This is the truth as I have seen similar things myself.”

Uh, Scully, can you look into this?

I like the progression — the gradual unraveling — in this second writer’s theories:

“Your laptop was plugged into the phone line, and, as soon as you left the room, it became a sentient being and tried to dial up a connection, over and over again.

“Your phone was programmed to automatically call room service at 7 p.m. until someone answered … or not.

“You are the only person to experience a Y2K-related phone glitch.

“Remember that kid you teased back in seventh grade? He’s baaackkk.”

That’s hard to top, but this is my favorite of all the 450-plus notes:

“I would guess that you have your dial-up .exe set to retry the line every five minutes, or you have your mail program set to check your in box every five minutes. Either that or you really made all those calls and have created a false reality in order to avoid having to pay for your foolish actions. In which case, the maid was a government spy who used your laptop to access your top-secret files, and then, just to kick you in the ass, made page after page of one-minute calls to the same number. Could go either way if you ask me, and you did.”

I thought that maid was suspicious!

The inspiring — or depressing, depending on your point of view — truth is that more than half of you who responded understood immediately what had baffled me.

Here’s one writer who put it eloquently and simply: “You left your e-mail application running and the computer connected to the phone jack. The application was set to poll for new e-mail every five minutes. So it called, checked and found no new e-mail, then logged off and did this every five minutes until you came back and disconnected it to use the phone.”

That sums it up beautifully: I use Eudora, and I have it programmed to check for new e-mail every five minutes. Way back in the mists of time, I also apparently configured it to automatically disconnect after it had searched for e-mail if it hadn’t been connected to begin with.

At the hotel I had checked my e-mail one last time before going to dinner, then disconnected the computer’s remote access connection, but I hadn’t quit the e-mail program or turned off my computer.

So while I was off at the Cafe des Artistes happily quaffing goblets of cabernet sauvignon and scarfing down platters of filet mignon and french fries, my persevering Powerbook G3 was valiantly attempting to check my e-mail, every five minutes.

It would rouse itself to look for the mail and then, discovering that it was disconnected from the MindSpring server, would dial up the local access number that I had earlier typed into the settings and saved. It would huff and puff and finally pry open a PPP connection and then it would zealously scour the system for e-mail, find that I had none and disconnect. Over and over and over again.

I don’t know about you, but I just don’t go around thinking about these things most of the time. I’m much more prone to think about what I should wear to the Cafe des Artistes and just how many stars there are in that Hollywood sky and what I should do if Gwyneth Paltrow sits next to me.

Actually, I do know about you — at least, 450 or so of you. And more than half of you apparently do think about such things. The good news is that only a few of you who solved the mystery felt the need to remind me just how stupid I had been. And many of you kindly confessed that you too had done similarly stupid things — and had in fact been faced with bills of even more gargantuan and stupefying proportion on checkout. I love you!

The only prize I can offer all of you who guessed correctly, alas, is an invitation, all expenses unpaid, to accompany me on my next business trip and try to keep me out of this kind of trouble. But I guess that would spoil the fun, wouldn’t it?

Now for the second part of the mystery: How did the hotel respond?

As you may recall, when we left the scene last week, I was anxiously peering with the front desk clerk at the prolific printout of my phone charges, trying to divine what had happened.

When I heard that every local call gets charged $1 and when I noticed that the calls were placed exactly every five minutes, the light bulb flashed: “Eudora!” I exclaimed.

I explained to the clerk about the e-mail program automatically connecting to the MindSpring server to check for mail every five minutes and then said something along the lines of “I realize this was a very stupid thing to do and was entirely my fault and you’re not responsible for my stupidity. On the other hand, I didn’t get anything out of these calls. I was away at dinner and really didn’t intend to make them, and I’d be ever so grateful if you could take these calls off my bill. Is that possible?” And I put on as pitifully imploring a look and as winning a smile as I could muster.

It would be good for the hotels of the world to see your e-mails to me on this matter, for about two-thirds of you felt that the hotel had stuck me with the charges in full, or at least in half. About a third of you thought the hotel waived the charges. And a small number of you wondered if the hotel waived the charges just for me because they knew I was a travel writer.

To address this last point first, I don’t think the hotel knew that I write a weekly travel column for Salon. My reservation had been made as part of a large block of rooms for the conference I was attending, I hadn’t received any kind of preferential treatment up to that point, as far as I could tell, and none of the hotel people I had encountered seemed to have the foggiest idea who I am (a not-uncommon occurrence).

I must say that when I had explained to the clerk what had happened, I was sorely tempted to take out a notepad and pen and say grandly, “By the way, I write a weekly travel column which is read by hundreds of thousands of people, and what did you say your name was again?” — but I didn’t. I just smiled and implored.

The clerk looked balefully at me and then at the Proustian printout and said in a tight little voice, “Excuse me,” and walked through a secret doorway behind the reception desk that is used only in cases where guests are considered to be unreasonable or unstable.

I was expecting her to return with a couple of knuckle-cracking musclemen in tuxedos or a slick-suited, sour-faced, “Sorry, but there’s nothing we can do”-spouting manager, but to my surprise she returned after a few minutes, alone and with a sweet glint in her eye.

She unfurled the phone log in front of me, raised a pen like a sword into the air and said, “We will not charge you for the calls made from here” — and she slashed above the first of the phony phone connections — “to here,” and she Zorro’d a line beneath the last of the lot.

Then, poising her pen above the next call, to a San Francisco number, she said, “It appears that you actually made this call — is that correct?”

Suffused — almost dizzy — with gratitude, I simply said, “Yes, yes, that’s correct.”

“Well then,” she said, with a mix of clerkly efficiency and queenly compassion, “let’s see — 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 … ” — and she knighted every single call with the tip of that pen. The total came to somewhere around 70 calls — $70! — and she poked a few buttons and pressed a few bars, and then a new bill spewed magically out of the printer with all the phony phone charges removed. History. I did not have to pay for them.

I felt like hugging her, but instead just thanked her a dozen times and complimented her company’s foresight and graciousness and shook hands with all the porters in the vicinity and told someone who was just checking in what a handsome hat she was wearing and then danced Fred Astaire-like out to my waiting taxi, dispensing lavish tips to everyone I encountered on the way. Happy ending.

But here are a couple of additional lessons worth considering:

1) Sure, I had been stupid and I really was responsible for those phone charges, but what kind of hotel charges $1 for a five-second local phone call? (Well, many kinds of hotels, in fact — but this certainly inspires me to check my hotel’s phone billing procedures more closely in the future.)

2) It pays to ask if you think something’s wrong. When I realized that Eudora had done me in, I was tempted to timidly eat the charges — but that just seemed unfair. Why should I pay so much for calls I hadn’t intended to make? And this applies to everything: If you don’t like your room, ask to be moved to another. If you see a charge on your bill that you can’t account for, challenge it. If your filet isn’t done well enough, send it back. If the dry cleaner didn’t get that stain off your suit, let it know. It’s a lesson I keep having to learn over and over and over, but you don’t get something taken care of unless you speak out about it.

One more thing: Now that I’ve thoroughly humbled myself in front of all of you, and hopefully taught you a valuable lesson about turning off your computer and your e-mail program in your hotel room when you’re not using it, I’d like to ask you one last question: Do you have a stupid traveler trick from your past that you’d be willing to share?

If you do, tell me. I’ll be happy to share your hard-won lessons anonymously, if you so desire. The important thing is that we can all learn from one another’s mistakes.

And if you tell me your worst stupid traveler trick, I’ll tell you about my other, much more memorable travel faux pas: the Case of the Undocumented Daughter and the Dumbfounded Daddy.

I had been invited as a travel expert — someone who’s been around long enough to tell people what they should know and shouldn’t do. So I gave my presentation and attended some enlightening and entertaining panels and receptions and dinners and it was all silky smooth until the night before I was due to check out.

Sometime during my last day in a hotel, I usually call up my account on the in-room TV just to make sure I haven’t inadvertently been charged for a dozen $6 mini-bar Cokes or someone hasn’t signed a $300 dinner tab to my room number.

I remoted my account onto the screen. Everything looked fine for the first day of my stay, Aug. 6, and for the beginning of Aug. 7. Then something went terribly, terribly wrong.

Aug. 7 started out with a few phone calls I’d made locally to set up appointments and check on some restaurants, then moved onto a couple of local phone calls I’d made to access my e-mail, then some calls I’d made to New York and the Bay Area, and then one final call to check e-mail again — about a dozen calls in all.

The line charges on the bill were conveniently numbered, and everything seemed to make sense up to this point, line 20.

I flipped down to the next screen and had to blink a few times. Something was wrong with my TV set. The screen was simply filled with this notation, line after line reading:

AUG 07 // Telephone Local // 362-0177 // $1.00.
AUG 07 // Telephone Local // 362-0177 // $1.00.
AUG 07 // Telephone Local // 362-0177 // $1.00.
AUG 07 // Telephone Local // 362-0177 // $1.00.
AUG 07 // Telephone Local // 362-0177 // $1.00.

Twenty lines in all. You get the idea.

I scrolled back up to the first page — it was all there just as before, up to item #20. I scrolled back to the second page and my eyes swam again in a sea of Telephone Local charges. I scrolled down and the third page was the same — full of AUG 07 // Telephone Local // 362-0177 // $1.00. Dozens of them! Reproducing like rabbits! I went to the fourth page — and it was the same! There was something Borgesian, Escherian, Kafkaesque — hell, Candid Camerian! — about this. The number was the same one I’d called to access my e-mail. But I hadn’t accessed my e-mail that many times!

Computer error, I thought. The computer-printer connection somehow got caught and just kept spewing out the same line. Or some kind of “ghost” — hadn’t I read about computer ghosts somewhere? — had entered into the system and burned this same line into the memory banks of the computer and it had just gone haywire. That was it. I glanced at the clock: 12:45 a.m. It was too late to call the front desk and check. I would have to wait until morning.

But just for the horror of it, I went on scrolling. I passed another page and a half of Telephone Locals before the account righted itself and went back to telephone calls I had really made, one on Aug. 7 and the rest on Aug. 8. This was even more unsettling.

Bright and bleary the next morning, I called the front desk. “Hello, this is Mr. George in the Nincompoop Suite. I believe there’s been something of a computer glitch in my account. Yes, if you look at it you’ll see line after line after line of local telephone charges for calls that I did not make. Yes. On Aug. 7, that’s right. You see them? Yes, there are really a lot of them, aren’t there? Just line after line. No, I did not make them.

“No, I did not make any of them. At least, I don’t recall making any of them. The ones on Aug. 8, I did make, yes, and the last one on Aug. 7. You’ll request a printout from the control room? I see. And how will that help exactly? Ah, you’ll request a printout of the times when the calls were made, so we can check them. Splendid! Thank you.”

I threw my clothes into my lovely, laudable three-wheeled Ciao Chariot and strode confidently down to the front desk. The printout would certainly solve the mystery, I thought.

“Hello, Mr. George!” a woman at the front desk chirpily greeted me. “Have you enjoyed your stay at our hotel?”

“Absolutely!” I replied with all the bravado I could muster, but I couldn’t help noticing that at the words “Mr. George” another woman at the desk had scurried away to confer with a colleague — and was even now walking hesitantly toward us bearing a folded pile of paper.

“You are Mr. George?”

It seemed a bit too late to pretend that I wasn’t, and sudden amnesia seemed too complicated, so I nodded meekly in agreement. “Here are your phone charges, Mr. George,” said she, unfurling a magnificent manuscript that would have made an ancient papyrus poet proud.

“But I didn’t make all these phone calls!” I sputtered.

“Well, let’s see,” said the very efficient and comforting woman who had originally greeted me, as she took the epic tenderly from my hands. Partners in detective practice now, we both peered intently at the printout, trying to discern some kind of pattern or clue.

The times were listed on the pages, and I noticed that the first suspect call was made at 7 p.m., shortly after I’d left my room to go to dinner. Someone had slipped into my room and made a series of local calls, all to the same number, all lasting just long enough to incur a $1 charge.

“How long can you talk for $1?” I asked.

“Actually, any call you make is charged $1, even if the call does not go through. It’s a basic service charge,” she said, evenly.

“So even if the call doesn’t go through, you still get charged for the call?” I asked, adrift in naiveti.

“Yes, that is our policy.”

This illumined things in a new light. I put my figurative detective hat back on and peered again at the times. An uncanny pattern quickly emerged: 7:00, 7:05, 7:10, 7:15, 7:20, 7:25 … On it continued, for pages and pages, like clockwork (you might say), until midnight, when I returned from dinner and phoned my San Francisco office number to check voicemail.

Then, in a flash, it hit me. Can you guess what it was?

Tell me what you think — and I’ll tell you what really happened, and how the hotel responded, next week.