|
Claim: A traveler mistook a hotel room safe for a microwave oven.
Example: [The New Zealand Herald, December 2007]
Origins: In December 2007, a story emerged in the news about a tourist who mistook her 
securely locked depository by bemused members of the inn's housekeeping staff.
"We were just down the corridor and she came out and asked us if we could help her work the microwave," executive housekeeper Annabel Fafeita said. "She was staying in one of our most expensive rooms, which have no kitchen facilities, so we assumed she'd bought her own microwave with her and went to see what we could do. We got there and told her politely, 'I'm sorry, but that's not a microwave — it's the safe!'" Undoing the attempt at cookery required the assistance of someone possessed of the master codes for the safe, because in her efforts to warm the ham and pineapple pie, the unnamed guest, a woman in her While at first blush the tale appears credible (it was covered by a number of newspapers, and a great deal of detail was provided via the various news accounts about the who, when, where, and how), there still exists reason to doubt it and even to suggest that if staff at The Hermitage had been called upon to crack a pizza-loaded safe, the one who had placed the pie in there had done so for the purpose of pulling their collective leg. Though in-room safes do bear a bit of a resemblance to microwave ovens thanks to their similar shape and the numeric keypads on their faces, they differ in important ways too, not the least of which is the presence of windows on microwaves versus the lack of ones on safes. Folks do like to watch what's cooking, yet a repository that granted easy view of its contents likely wouldn't find many purchasers lined up to buy
Yet beyond the physical differences between the two items lies a marked disparity in where either of them are placed in lodgings that are let for rent. A microwave oven (in a room equipped with one, which the standard accommodations at The Hermitage weren't) is typically positioned out in the open, usually near the room's coffee maker, or in more extensive digs on a counter in its kitchenette. Out of sight is out of mind, so hoteliers don't want to place microwaves in locations that foster the likelihood of guests' forgetting that they're cooking something (and possibly smoking out a room, filling it with a foul smell, or even triggering a fire). An Barring some unusual hotel room set-up, for this story about an in-room safe being mistaken for a microwave oven to be the real thing we would have to allow for the traveler's not only failing to question why there was no window in the face of the "oven" or why the microwave left for her use was so gosh-darned small, but also failing to question why it was inconveniently stashed in a closet or behind the shut doors of a cabinet or armoire — that's a bit much to credulously swallow as gospel, even if some number of news outlets failed to wonder about such details. And even if events did unfold as described, that doesn't rule out the possibility that the whole thing was staged as a prank or a form of publicity stunt. Barbara "closet cook" Mikkelson Last updated: 2 January 2008 Urban Legends Reference Pages © 1995-2009 by Barbara and David P. Mikkelson. This material may not be reproduced without permission. snopes and the snopes.com logo are registered service marks of snopes.com.  Sources:
|
|
