We all do things that we don’t want to get caught doing.  Sometimes we do embarrassing things, sometimes illegal things and sometimes just stupid things.  I’m certainly no different from the rest of the herd because I’ve done my share.  I’ve also combined embarrassing, illegal and stupid into one event.

    I was working in Seattle on a project and got stuck there for about a month.  A couple of weeks into my stay I realized that after awhile it can get pretty boring in even the greatest cities.  I was working long hours every day, going out to eat someplace nice every night and crashing in my hotel room the rest of the time.  This was every single day including weekends.

    One night I couldn’t sleep.  I decided to watch a pay-per-view movie in my room, but was stuck with a dilemma.  The problem was that it would appear on my hotel bill and my employer wouldn’t pay for it.  I don’t remember what the movie was, probably something like “Zombies in Lingerie” or some such crap.  Anyway, my sleep deprived mind started rationalizing why I should watch the movie and that I shouldn’t pay for it.  I figured that since I would have never considering watching it if I had to pay for it, it was okay to watch it if I didn’t have to pay for it.

    So there I was, in my underwear moving the three hundred pound credenza away from the wall in my hotel room at midnight.  I had to move the credenza in order to get to the cable jack and I had to get to the cable jack to disconnect the cable.  Then I had to disconnect the cable box from the TV, but they had one of those metal sleeves on it to keep you from doing just that.  Luckily I had a little pocket screwdriver (it’s a nerd thing) and with some effort I could slowly rotate the nut on the connector.  It took a minute or two, but I got the cable box connection loose from the TV.  The cable box sends the signal to the front desk so they can bill you.  If I took it out of the loop, I could get the movies straight from the cable and nobody would ever know.

    I took the cable coming from the wall loose from the back of the cable box and stuck it into the TV connector.  In that in that same instant...BEEP!...BEEP!...BEEP!...BEEP!.. the hotel fire alarm went off!  In the first half second I thought I was caught.  Then, I realized it was the fire alarm.  So, I’m standing there in my underwear on the seventh or eighth floor of a hotel debating whether to put on some clothes and leave the room or put everything back in order, THEN put on clothes and leave the room.  I figured with my luck, the fire marshal would be sifting through the charred ruins of the hotel the next day and exclaim, “AH-HA!  Look at this...somebody in room 8112 hotwired the cable box!”  And I knew I didn’t want THAT showing up on my expense report!  Needless to say I spent about five minutes putting things back like they were supposed to be before I left my room.  I kept an eye out for smoke, though.

    Remember, while honesty is the best policy, the impression of honesty works just as well in many cases.