![]() ![]() They’d listened as Bowie asked, “Is there life on Mars?” A Flock of Seagulls’ answer was, “Yes. And in Britain, a new wave of bands armed with synthesizers were beckoning the future in their own way. NASA began launching its fleet of shuttles to explore the infinite. Armageddon felt imminent with the threat of nuclear war between the US and the Soviet Union hanging in the air. In the early 1980s, the future had never seemed so near. This is the sound of A Flock of Seagulls. An alien intercepts them and signals back. His employer got the lifetime ban notice shortly after.A young boy sends signals out into space using an old penny and some string. He returned for the night to find that his belongings had been moved to a smaller room. “I had absolutely no idea what to tell her, so I just said, ‘I’m sorry,’ and I went to dinner.” “I can still remember the look on the cleaning lady’s face when she opened the door,” Burchill wrote. That’s when he called the front desk for help. The bird wasn’t harmed, but the projectile did startle a group of tourists milling around on the hotel lawn, he said.Īs he scrambled to clean up, he let a running hair dryer fall into the sink, triggering a power outage, he wrote. “In a moment of clarity,” he said, he grabbed a towel, wrapped up the gull and threw it outside. “As you would expect, the room was covered in seagull crap.”Īfter the initial mayhem, Burchill managed to shoo most of the birds out by opening the remaining windows, but one stayed behind. “In case you were wondering, Brothers TNT Pepperoni does NASTY things to a seagull’s digestive system,” he wrote. There must have been 40 of them, he said. In his letter, Burchill recalled his shock when he opened the door to his room that afternoon in 2001 and saw “an entire flock of seagulls” laying waste to the place. As anyone who has spent time near a body of salt water can tell you, seagulls are aggressive creatures that will scavenge for just about anything - even landfill trash, as Popular Science notes. The fourth-floor room in which Burchill stayed during the ill-fated trip faced Victoria’s inner harbor, a stone’s throw from the docks. In retrospect, the whole situation was ripe for trouble. It’s a really funny story to tell 17 years later, but I was sitting here thinking about the housekeeper and what her first reaction must have been when she opened that door.” “The hotel followed up with his employer afterwards, saying he’s not welcome back at the hotel due to the damage in the room,” she told the Canadian Press. “It is absolutely a true story,” Drake said. But they checked the records and, sure enough, the seagull story was no joke. Tracey Drake, the hotel’s public relations director, told the Canadian Press that some staff members thought Burchill’s letter was an April Fools Day prank. “I was just kind of in and out,” he added. “When I was talking to the people at the desk and the manager, they did say that they had heard this story from a long-term employee that works there,” he told CBC News. ![]() The incident is now apparently Fairmont Empress lore, according to Burchill. A picture posted to his Facebook account shows him and two hotel staff members laughing together. Hotel staff said in a statement that they had reviewed his request for a pardon and lifted the ban.īurchill dropped by the front desk over the weekend and gave the managers a pound of Brothers TNT Pepperoni as a “peace offering,” he told CBC News. Burchill, by all accounts, abided by the decision.īut on Sunday, the Fairmont Empress decided to open its doors to him once again. The mess was so bad that the management sent a letter to Burchill’s employers saying he could never stay there again.
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