Electric Ass

If anyone has stayed in a hotel room in the last few years you have probably noticed they give you those electronic room key cards. If you have stayed in the crack motel, you might not have seen one of these as of yet but they look like a credit card and you simply insert them, or swipe them, into a reader embedded in the door. CLICK! And your room opens.

They are supposed to be safer than a key because most hotels never re-key their locks and any psychopath could make a duplicate key and steal your Twinkies in the middle of the night.

But there is also one flaw. They seem to be FAR more sensitive to EMI (electrical magnetic interference) than an average credit card. It seems like I have had a slew of them that didn’t work and I have to keep going to the front desk to get them re-done. Not a big deal if you are right around the corner, or if you are an elevator kind of person. But I am not. I take the stairs and so by the time I go up, figure out it doesn’t work, back down and then back up again, it is a fair bit of exercise when I am carrying my backpack. Mostly, it’s just a hassle.

So I asked the front desk chick what the problem was and she told me that carrying the card next to your wallet or cell-phone might erase it. Check. I was definitely doing this as I would stick my Razr cell-phone and the hotel key-card in the same back pocket. I might even set the key-card on top of my wallet. Of course, my credit cards in my wallet never care if my cell phone is on top of it, but maybe the technology for key-cards in hotels is not as robust.

So this last trip I paid extra attention and made sure that the key card never came within proximity of either my cell phone or my wallet. I put it into my back pocket like usual and that was it.

But, still, EVERY freaking night when I’d get back to the hotel room it didn’t work and had to be re-programmed. So the next logical conclusion is that my ass is electric and puts out some EMI. I wonder if I can market this…..