Towel-snatchers, take heed. The Independent (UK) published this court transcript from the trial of a man charged with stealing over 40,000 coat hangers from hotels. Fact or fiction? Reads like vintage Monty Python or Fawlty Towers… though it's presumably being published as real (wink, wink). Part one is here, Part two is here–and includes this counsel/defendant repartee on the seedy, secretive subculture of hotel-klepto interior design obsessives:
Counsel: And people come to you, do they, asking you to make special wardrobes so that they can use stolen clothes hangers?
Chrysler: It isn't so much the fact that they are stolen that makes them attractive. You have to remember that many top businessmen spend more of their time in hotels than in their own home. They become used to hotel life. They think of hotels as home. Therefore they become used to hotel hangers and think of them as normal, and on the rare occasions when they spend some time at home they can't stand these fiddly things with hooks which you and I may think of as normal but which the business traveller thinks of as loose-fitting and badly designed. So they come to me and get me to make a hotel-style wardrobe.
Counsel: Are you seriously suggesting that there are people who prefer hotel life to home life?
Chrysler: Certainly. A lot of businessmen would never go home if they had the chance. So when they get home they like to recreate the hotel experience in their own house. Many of my clients have their own mini-bars in their bedrooms. They have TV sets at the end of the bed on a raised shelf, often with an adult sex channel on it. All their bathroom products come in wrappers and are thrown away each day. I have even known people in their own home put out "Do Not Disturb" notices on the door of their own bedroom.
Counsel: Stolen, presumably, from some hapless hotel.
Link Discuss (Thanks Jed; via kith.org)
