WHAT’S THAT STRANGE ODA?
Conservative Member of Parliament Bev Oda is in trouble again. This time for ordering a $16 glass of orange juice from room service at London’s Savoy hotel while we taxpayers were picking up the tab.
I have a different slant on this. I would like to thank Bev for not ordering a full breakfast. I don’t know about the Savoy, but the price of room service pancakes at Victoria’s Empress hotel, also a Fairmont property, is a wind sucking $40 once you factor in all charges.
In Bev’s defense, maybe she just ordered the juice without thinking, without carefully going over the room service menu like I did while staying at the Empress. That’s how I found out an $11.00 bottle of pedestrian cab merlot sets you back $73, fully delivered.
Curiously, the Empress charges a five dollar delivery charge on room service, plus a fifteen percent gratuity, two charges for exactly the same service. That’s why you should always ask the server what they’ll be doing for their fifteen percent. Will they be juggling, can we expect a card trick, or is their specialty Bev Oda impersonations?
Also, before trashing a person it is always best to walk a mile in their moccasins. Or at least down a very long hotel corridor in Bev’s pumps searching for breakfast. In all fairness, she did choose the least expensive breakfast option. She could have gone with the Bengal Express. That’s where two ornately dressed and beefy males place you in a cute, ‘fits on top of an elephant’ carriage and pack you to the dining room, $425 for the round trip.
I actually feel sorry for Bev, because I too have been victimized by Fairmont prices. We were staying at the Empress, someone else’s dime, and pretty much intoxicated, decided on a nightcap at the venerable Bengal Lounge. (Nice word, nightcap. Kinda rhymes with hangover. )
It was a happy crowd we joined, probably because they were all on expense
accounts and we weren’t. Which was too bad because the Martini I wanted was $18 ($23 all in). It was also three ounces, one more than I needed. So I asked the server if I could have a two-ounce size, thinking that would be six bucks less. Of course I was accommodated, of course they charged me full price. Yes I’ll be hearing of this for the rest of my life.
This orange juice incident is not the first time Bev has got into trouble. She also has a thing for limos, on which she spent $2800 while in London. But hey, a girl needs fantasies. We’ve all played “limo” at one time or another, issuing classic lines like, “We have a limo at our disposal,” or, “To the Embassy Jeeves, and don’t spare the horses.” Wait a minute, we paid for a BMW!
My favourite limo game is “Air Support.” And who knows, once all the costs are known we might find out Bev hired the RAF to cover her cross town journey. For that game we need handles, groovy monikers. You could be Eye In the Sky, I could be Ground Zero and Bev could be Big Spender.
Some might be critical of Bev’s limos but their use is standard diplomat practice. You see, Bev helms the Canadian International Development Agency, an agency that hands out economic relief to countries so poor you’ve never heard of them, that and the occasional luxury hotel and limo service.
Basically her job is to entice these nations over to a capitalistic life style, and nothing does that better than a meeting, “Don Corleone style” in the back of a limo. In diplomatic circles this is known as the “Tommy Vu” approach. Remember Tommy, hell he even looks like Bev without the cigarette, the little Asian guy surrounded by the trappings of wealth, most notably buxom, scantily clad women, Tommy saying, “You like these girls, you like this yacht, come to my seminar, you be rich beyond your wildest dreams.”
True, Bev is having a harder time justifying the $6000 she spend on limos while attending the Junos in Halifax, but hell she must have mistaken Halifax for a third world country. The way some of those rock stars dress, they sure don’t look like they’re from around here.
I as a taxpayer have other, more pressing concerns, how to get even for being overcharged for my martini being at the top of the list. So far the plan is to sandwich my 1984, “been to Afghanistan and back” Ford Ranger between the Bentley and the Ferrari parked in front of the Empress and refuse to move it until they come forth with the missing ounce of gin. While I’m at it, I’ll try to get some money back on the orange juice.
slightlycorkedandmore 