You know that story about the Princess and the Pea…….well, I have my own version now.  I just spent the weekend at a sweet first birthday celebration for a sweet grandbaby, which included spending two nights in a clean but somewhat worn beach motel of significant cost (about the only local place still available during this summer weekend on the coast).  The room was painted kind of a depressing, dark blue-green, the decor was dated and the bathroom fanlight combo was so loud that you had to use the bathroom in the dark, lest you wake up everyone else in the room.  However, the location,  which at least was across the road from the water, was ideal and the place kind of grew on us.  There were four of us, sisters and a daughter, sharing the room.  We made it sort of a fun chick-trip.

The first night, I was settling into bed when I felt what I thought was a metal spring sticking up out of the mattress.  I reached about  below the sheets and pulled out…….a large screw, like the kind you might drill into sheetrock (the picture is about true-to-size). How weird is that? I am perplexed about how it got there.  Looking around the room, there didn’t appear to be any recent renovation going on.  And it was on top of the mattress but below the bottom sheet, which means that the housekeeper must have made the bed over the screw that was already lying on the mattress.  Maybe?  Or someone put it there (ha ha, take that, you tourists)?  Or there was a screw that had somehow gotten folded into the sheets that perhaps fell out when the bed was made?  Or has it been there for a long time, and people have just kept sleeping on top of the screw?  We were baffled. And wondering what else might be under those sheets. Something to think about.

Looking for a reaction, the next morning I brought it down to the front desk, where the overnight guy was still on duty. I held up the screw and said,  “I found a screw in my bed“.  Um, okay, maybe that didn’t come out sounding just right.  He looked at me like I was from another planet.  Trying again, “There was a screw under the sheets“.  Blank face.  Actually,  I think he was trying to keep from laughing, or maybe it was just the culmination of another long night on the job for him.  Either way, not much of a response. I slunk away, maybe a little embarrassed.

When we ran into the changing of the guard later that afternoon,  I flourished the screw to the new audience at the front desk.  This time I explained that I had felt something sharp under the sheets that I thought was a spring, then held the screw up to the two guys talking there and exclaimed, “But it wasn’t a spring. Look what I found under the sheets!”.  The response was essentially something like “Gee, would ya look at that!” and the two guys studied the screw intently, as if it was a relic from space.

In the scheme of things, it really was no big deal, but if this was The Hampton, I bet they would have offered a discount……