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Travel Tip: How a Deadbolt Nearly Killed Me
By Heejeong Haas | July 27, 2007
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I have been talking about the things I experienced at the conference and pointed out several things that can go wrong. Now, since we have been studying so to say, I will talk about what kind of stupid thing I did while I was staying during the conference. This has nothing to do with your doing business with Korean business partners, but it may have something to do with the fact that next time when you work with me, you may have to call the front desk of the hotel where I will stay.
My hotel was right by this river, had a beautiful view, and wonderful aroma from tons of restaurants around the river. One night during my stay, I got caught up with some work and stayed up late. It was about 1AM when I finally started feeling very tired. As I didn’t finish all the things I wanted to get done, I decided to step out to the balcony to refresh myself while looking down the river and all the buildings downtown. So I stepped out, stretched and sat there for a while enjoying a little peaceful moment. As I got up and tried to open the sliding door, I realized that the door was locked behind me! I didn’t know what to do, so I sat there and thought for a while what I was supposed to do in order to solve that situation. I looked down the river, but nobody was around as it was late. But I decided to get people’s attention. By the way, my room was up on the 8th floor.
I just screamed and shouted “hello” many times… Finally a group of people passing by the hotel and they heard me. All the way from the 8th floor, I shouted explaining to them what happened and asked them to please go to the lobby and let them know that I was locked in the balcony. (I doubt that he is reading this blog, but thank you very much!!!) So, about 10 minutes later I could see somebody was trying to open the room door through the curtain from the outside of the balcony. But alas! The deadbolt was on, and the hotel crew couldn’t even get in. One assistant from the hotel walked outside and explained to me what was going on, of course shouting, all the way from the ground level. They couldn’t open the door so that they were thinking about either taking the door down or calling their senior security officer who might be able to unlock that deadbolt. I was very frustrated and petrified. But what can you do? I just had to wait. All I could do was sitting there looking into my own room through the white curtain and looking at my beloved laptop screen displaying my screen saver while they were trying to “rescue” me. When I was finally rescued, it was already way passed 2AM. The hotel profusely apologized and offered to give me the credit for that night since it was their fault that the door was malfunctioning. Well, actually, it didn’t make a big difference at all to me since I didn’t pay for the hotel.
So, all of you, be careful when you close the sliding door behind you. Better yet, when you work with me next time, please make sure that the sliding door of the hotel works. My requirement for a hotel used to be “high speed internet” and “workout facility”, now I have one more requirement to say “no auto-lock sliding doors”. And watch out for that deadbolt… That really is the bolt of death.
Heejeong Haas
August 27th, 2007 at 12:40 pm
[…] As a follow up to the earlier stories about the Challenges of Overseas Manufacturing (Part I, Part II, Part III), I’d like to give a shout out to Heejeong Haas, the “Queen of Seoul.” Heejeong performed translation services for us in some important negotiations with our Korean business partners and made a huge difference in the end result by tactfully bridging not only the language gap but the cultural gap. If you need a Korean translator, she would be my first call. She also has a very interesting blog if you want to dive into more of the details about cross-cultural business communications, and locking yourself on hotel balconies. […]