The Iceman Cometh (Craig's perspective)

[A guest post from Craig]

Our apartment, as you might expect, has a refrigerator and freezer, but making ice isn’t really an option with only one sad ice tray. Laura likes ice in her insulated water bottle. We like ice to chill our drinks and cocktails in the evening. So every day—if not multiple times a day—we have to call room service and request ice.

Most of the time, someone from room service shows up with 10-20 minutes with the ice.  Occasionally, it’s longer—or it doesn’t show up at all. This then requires an additional call to the service line to inquire as to the whereabouts of the ice. As you might imagine, it can be complicated.

Ice comes in one of two sizes of bucket at our hotel/executive apartment complex: an “individual” sized ice bucket really only good for putting a small amount of ice in two glasses, or the traditional champagne bottle ice bucket. I like the larger bucket—there’s more than enough ice for the evening. Laura likes the small, because she believes the ice is more hygienic as the exterior of a champagne or white wine bottle has not sidled into the bucket.

What I don’t understand is why we can’t get our own ice. There is no ice machine on our floor. No ice machine on any floor. It’s not a thing. I’d gladly take our (well cleaned) champagne bucket and go to any floor of the executive apartment building and fill it anytime I want with ice, rather than calling and then waiting (and sometimes waiting more) for it to show up.

It’s become a bit of a running joke with the lady on the service line. <<Phone ringing>> “Yes, Mr. Hanna? How can I be of assistance this evening.” Me: “Guess.” (Laughing) “Yes, I’ll send them with ice right away.”

Laura says the ice makes quite a journey. While visiting the pool on the roof of the hotel connected to our apartment she found a room labeled “Ice Making”. She believes the ice comes from there, travels down to the ground floor, is carried through the hotel lobby and through the connecting corridor to the lobby of the apartment tower and then up to our floor. Which is why the ice is often partially soupy upon arrival.

As if this post isn’t silly enough, talking about room service ice and all our “travails” with it, here’s even more: housekeeping do not remove the emptied ice buckets or ice serving utensils (which range from a large soup spoon to flat tongs to serrated tongs to a variety of other random utensils). We have to give the ice buckets to room service; otherwise they simply accumulate in our kitchen. I think at one point we had four ice buckets and a bevy of serving utensils stored up. So the ice delivery is often a dance of handing over the ice bucket from the service tray, asking them to wait, then balancing one or more other buckets and associated serving devices and handing them over.

Assorted ice paraphernalia.

Silly, really, when a simple ice machine would do.