How to make every phone in a Courtyard by Marriott ring at the same time
Recently I was staying in a Courtyard By Marriott in midtown, Savannah Georgia. My wife and I were in one room and my parents were next door. We were in town to sightsee and eat as much greasy food as possible. We were successful on both missions. Staying in adjacent rooms at a Courtyard hotel is a great arrangement because my daughter (who also happens to be named Savannah–no connection), can sleep in one room when she needs to take an nap, and my dad and I can sit outside in the courtyard and drink beer. Who needs a baby monitor?
This hotel didn’t have reliable Wifi, but there was a connection in each room which looked kinda like DSL. There was a small modem with an input and output jack for the phone line, and an ethernet cable jack to plug into your computer. You’ve probably seen them in countless hotel rooms.
My mom has an old Ibook and she wanted to learn how to use IChat so that we could videoconference in the future. She brought the computer along with her on the trip, and I brought my Macbook Pro as well. The catch was that we couldn’t set up videoconferencing from one room to the other, because I wanted to set the computers side by side to show her how the whole process worked, from both ends of the connection.
So we cooked up a nefarious plan. I pulled the DSL modem-type device out of my room and I daisy chained it onto the end of the modem in her room. I expected that there was about a 10% chance the setup would work, and about an 80% chance that I was about to pay for a fried modem, but to my surprise, we both had connections. Each machine was slow, but it was fast enough.
By this point, it was about 11:30 on a Monday night. My dad had long-since fallen asleep on the bed from his daily overdose of fried southern food. I was drowsy myself, and I think most of the hotel’s guests, (probably business travelers) were starting to bed down.
Then it happened. I was showing my mom how to send a video conference invite to the other user. I clicked the little green icon next to her name on my buddylist, and RING RING! The entire hotel instantly broke out in a chorus of synchronized phone ringers. We both nearly fell out of our chairs. They echoed across the courtyard, and right through our open sliding-glass door. That couldn’t have been me, right? I quickly cancelled the invitation and the ringing stopped. Sheepishly I hit the button again, and again they broke out ringing instantaneously. Savannah, woke up, cried out, and went back to sleep. My mom turned white. She’s already a technophobe, and I could tell she concerned we were about to get kicked out of the hotel thanks to some stupid computer glitch.
But on the third try, my awesome power was gone. Somehow the hotel’s system had corrected itself and the IChat software was no longer able to kick off every phone in the place. Or maybe it was because I switched from a .mac sign-in to an AIM username. Who knows. But if you’re ever interested in screwing around with the phone system in a Marriott, now you know how.
May 24th, 2009 at 9:29 pm
I’ve enjoyed this post, good work, i’ll keep tuned.