Nor Any Drop to Drink Without Status

I was checking into a Courtyard in Florida, week eight of a stretch that has another twelve weeks to go. I don't drink the tap water in this part of the state. Much of Florida draws from underground limestone aquifers, and even at low parts-per-million the sulfur comes through as that rotten-egg taste that makes you reconsider dehydration as the better option. So I look forward to the two bottles of water that are supposed to be waiting in the room. They get forgotten more often than not, which means a trip to the desk is part of the routine by now.

The attendant told me they had water for purchase in the lobby market, but they were no longer stocking rooms. I mentioned this seemed odd. I've watched Marriott, Hilton, and IHG do the opposite for a decade. He acknowledged the change was recent. Then he said I could grab a couple of bottles from the market, because I was an Ambassador Elite member. He added that these would be the only two for the week.

I said thanks and went to find them.

It took me longer than it should have to notice what had actually happened in that exchange. A bottle of water in the room used to be the baseline. Now it's a benefit, dispensed once, and only because I happened to be carrying the right status in my loyalty profile. Nobody voted on this. No email went out explaining the shift. A property-level decision quietly converted a standard into a perk, and the only reason I found out the workaround existed at all was that I had status to trigger it. Someone without a card in their wallet, or without a hundred nights logged in the same hotel brand, gets the same rotten-egg tap water and no path around it.

What bothers me isn't really the water. It's that I had to ask, and asking revealed a rule that had never been disclosed. I wasn't offered water for purchase as an option among several. I was told the free version was gone, and the only reason I got a version of it back was that I happened to fit a category the attendant could act on. If I'd been a first-time guest with no history at that brand, the conversation ends at "we sell it in the market," and that's a perfectly defensible sentence on its own. It's only defensible until you know there's a quieter track running next to it, available to some guests and invisible to the rest.

The attendant wasn't being stingy. He was administering a rule he'd probably been handed a week earlier, doing his best to be generous within it. But generosity that only activates for the right tier isn't generosity. It's rationing dressed up as a perk.

I thought of a training video I sat through years ago, the kind that gets recycled through healthcare customer-service orientations. It featured Farrell's, the ice cream parlor chain. We had one at Northlake Mall in Doraville, a birthday destination for every kid in the area. The video told a simple story: a customer asked for an extra pickle because she liked the taste, and the server told her it would be seventy-five cents. The store protected a nickel and lost a regular.

I've seen the smaller version of this play out elsewhere lately, and it doesn't always come from the property. A few weeks earlier, boarding a flight out of Las Vegas, I found myself standing in the front galley for a minute or two while the line backed up behind me. Two flight attendants were on their phones. Neither looked up. I gave them the benefit of the doubt at first; there are plenty of legitimate reasons to be heads-down before a flight, a manifest issue, a passenger note, something relayed from the gate. Then one of them turned to the other and said, "you have to see this," and I heard enough of what followed to know it wasn't airline business. The FA greeting gets mocked for being scripted, but a scripted greeting is still an acknowledgment that you exist. Even a hollow line tells a boarding passenger that someone registered them walking on. Silence doesn't clear even that low a bar. What I watched in that galley wasn't a failure of warmth. It was a failure of acknowledgment, and acknowledgment is the floor, not the ceiling.

What's strange is that it doesn't stop with staff. It's started showing up in how guests treat each other, too.

A few weeks after the Las Vegas flight, I was upgraded on a short hop from St. Louis to Atlanta, seat 1A, carry-on in hand, which meant I needed to board early enough to actually find room for my bag before the overhead space filled up with safety equipment or crew bags. So I did the thing we all make fun of. I stood near the gate before my group was called. Gate lice, technically, though I had a real reason.

The man next to me was holding a paper boarding pass, zone five, narrating the pre-board line loud enough for five or six of us to hear whether we wanted to or not. "Look at all them." "They're walking better than I am." "I hate it when people game the system." It had the cadence of a bit, Archie Bunker workshopping a new routine, except nobody around him was laughing. I didn't say anything. I thought about mentioning that I felt fortunate not to have any challenges, visible or otherwise, that would put me in that line. I didn't say that either. It didn't feel like it would land the way I meant it, and gate-side wasn't the place to find out.

It's common enough to look at a boarding group and privately wonder who actually needs to be there. Announcing it out loud to strangers is a different thing. That's the guest-side version of what happened at the Courtyard desk: a system built on transaction has started deputizing the people inside it to police each other's legitimacy, because nobody trusts the system itself to have gotten it right.

Paul Theroux wrote that the rewarding kind of travel depends on the kindness of strangers, putting yourself in the hands of people you don't know and trusting them with your life. What I watched this month was smaller and pettier than that. Still, it's the same trust, tested at a much lower stakes level: can I count on the person behind the counter, or the person two seats over, to treat me like I'm owed basic decency rather than something I have to unlock?

The water bottle is the washcloth test again, same diagnosis, different object. So is the greeting at the front of the plane.

And the guest in zone five, mocking the people ahead of him, is doing his own version of the same collapse. He's decided the people around him are gaming a system rather than using one, because money changing hands makes it easy to believe everyone's playing the same simple game he is. Nobody in any of these scenes was cruel. The attendant was following a new rule as kindly as the rule allowed. The flight attendants weren't hostile, just checked out for a minute. The man at the gate wasn't wrong that some people game pre-boarding. But none of them, and none of us, ever quite says out loud what we're actually responsible for once money's involved: whether we're keeping a promise, or just making a sale.

That's the part the transaction lets everyone skip. It's easier to treat the transaction as the whole exchange than to ask what you owe the person on the other side of it, or what they owe you. Easy to forget, standing at a desk or a gate, that you're the stranger too, the one someone else is deciding whether to extend decency to before they know anything about you.

That responsibility doesn't disappear just because nobody says it out loud. It moves. It lands on whoever's standing closest when something's missing. An attendant improvising a rule he didn't write. A stranger absorbing a comment he didn't deserve. Nobody signed up for that arrangement. It's just what happens when a standard that used to hold on its own starts depending on who's paying attention, on both sides of the counter, until nobody remembers it was ever owed to begin with.

Come back next week and i will take you to Grenada...