NoChancer Headlines

Friday, June 8, 2007

Imposter!


First and foremost I want to apologize for the extended delay in articles. I know how much you all have grown to need my writing in much the same way a barnacle needs a whale. Or is it the other way around? Point is you’re the whale and I’m the barnacle. Shall we?

Recently a story came out of the Bay Area about a girl who spent an entire year attending Stanford University, except she didn’t actually go there. She managed to talk her way into a dorm room and convinced virtually everyone she know that she was enrolled there. I’ve got a few thoughts:
1) It’s a sign of the times that the pressure of attending the “right school” drives someone this far. Well done Baby Einstein/Kaplan/Sylvan.
2) Good work. You have to be impressed that an 18 year old pulled this off. I would even be a little awed if it weren’t for the fact that…
3) I do this all the time! I practically invented the fake enrollment thing!

One of my earliest memories is traveling with my dad and hotel crashing. We would go to the top floor, see the view, hang out in the lobby, even take food from room service trays. I want to take this moment to sincerely thank my dad for this informal education, it has served me well. Hotels are goldmines of freeness, and I highly recommend availing yourself of their services. It’s really the perfect environment; hotels are built around providing customer satisfaction, they’ll get you anything you want, and with such high volume there’s no way they can keep track of who’s legit and who’s not. Even if you don’t want to go all out, if you’re new to a city find a nice hotel and talk to the concierge. They’ll be able to tell you about good restaurants, give directions, even get you tickets to shows. Just make sure you’re in a Four Seasons and not a Ramada or the concierge will give you the old, “there’s a lot of great places to eat in Sacramento. We’ve got a Applebees, a Fridays and a Hooters.” Yeah, that recently happened to me.
There’s a small cult of such freeloaders who go from city to city partaking in quasi-free goodness. I’m sure they won’t be particularly happy that I’m sharing this with you, but my readers come first. Plus I enjoy reminiscing.
In San Francisco the St. Francis near Union Square has glass elevators that are on the exterior of the building, it’s easily the best view of the city. Every time I was in the neighborhood I’d stop in for a quick ride.
One of the all-time best has to be the Marriot in San Deigo. The pool area is more of a rainforest draped by palm trees and trails that opens into winding pools and a grotto hot tub. Good lord I have spent some time in that hot tub. As soon as you enter the lobby turn left, first bank of elevators take them a floor down, you’re there. I’d go down there wearing swim trunks and carrying a towel.
For a couple years my buddy The Reverend and I had the top floor of this hotel in Boston locked down, right near the Wang Theater, the exact name escapes me. It was an unbelievably great find. The hotel had inexplicably stopped using its top floor, even though it had its own lobby with enormous comfy couches, a bar, and a big screen tv. We’d pack some food and go there to watch the Patriots games, I believe we even watched the ball drop on New Year’s once. Tragically they shut it down, but Jesus it was good times. It’s honestly hard to believe we never got caught, but its like that floor had slipped through some crack in the space time continuum.

Back to our girl the fake Stanfordite. College campuses are also great places to crash. I made a living off the practice for a solid two years. When I first moved to San Francisco I didn’t know anyone, didn’t have a job, didn’t have a place to live. I would spend all day on the Cal campus attending lectures on everything from Mexican governmental history to astrophysics, and then chow down at the receptions after. After finding a place to live me and my roommate Sir Trotter would go to the International House (reserved for students from foreign countries) to watch Monday Night Football on their big screen tv. The foreign kids never wanted to watch football, but we would just walk up and change the channel. After a few weeks they gave up and we had the lobby to ourselves. In retrospect that’s a perfect microcosm of America’s relationship to the rest of the world. Good times.
I’ve also spent some time at the aforementioned Stanford campus. It’s easy to see how this girl got away with it for so long, that campus is a cakewalk. Back in the day (2001 is officially back in the day right?) I would go down there and crash with my friend Farcus, who actually managed to get into Stanford. All the cafeterias are all you can eat, so you either slide in and pile your plate high, or have a friend bring you something out. Even better some of the resident houses have magic cupboards, meaning every week the students put together a list of what food they want and then the school delivers the requests. Befriend someone in those houses and they’ll let you take anything, they don’t care, they’ll just go back to the magic cupboard. I once walked out of a house with well over 100 PopTarts.

The key to crashing is simple confidence, I promise it’s infinitely easier than you would imagine. Of course it helps to be white, and male, and not dressed like a hobo. No surprise there. The point is there’s a world of resources around you everyday just waiting for you to illicitly use them. The next time you’ve got some time to kill in the downtown city of your choosing, peruse the hotel scene. In fact, NoChance is now the official headquarters of hotel/college campus crashing. Know any good spots? Have some useful hints? Feel free to share. Maybe some day we can all meet up in the conference room on the top floor of the Nikko. No reservation needed after six p.m., trust me.