The Alphas and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Night

Long story, not short.  We arrived at our beach rental in Mission Beach on Tuesday.  The condo wasn't exactly what we had imagined. The pictures made it look bigger and "sleeps 6" translates  to sleeps 3 comfortably but person number 4 is stuck with the small not so comfortable futon.  If 6 people stay there 4 of them better really, really like each other.  The "bay view" requires looking out the bathroom window and the "ocean view" requires leaning out the back bedroom window.

Admittedly, the beach was close and the weather was nice.  And the company was AMAZING.

First problem was that the broadband wasn't working. We put in a call to property management and they dithered.  Finally gave us the account info and we worked with the provider and determined a tech visit was required.   Tech came out the next morning and checked stuff out.  Said it wasn't inside it was outside.  We called the property management and told them to come baby sit while we went to the beach.  Got a text that internet was up.  Only 24 hours after it  was supposed to be available to our people that really needed to check in with work (not me - I'm retired).

The next day we explored San  Diego and then went out to  a nice dinner.  Returned home at 9:30 to discover the keyless entry was broken.  We could not get in.  We saw a patch where a  dog door used to be  and figured the smallest of us (not me) would crawl in.  But removing the patch, we discovered it was not a dog door it was a cat door.   None of us fit.  And sticking an arm in to try and reach the deadbolt did not work.  Sticking an broom stick in to push the  the dead bolt did not work.  Sticking other tools we located or borrowed from the neighbor didn't work. There were realty type key boxes on the stairs that we didn't know  the code to but tried the door code.   No luck.

We had called the property management and texted the property management repeatedly to no avail.  We were working on finding a place to spend the night sans jammies, toothbrushes or the ice cream brownies we'd been planning on.   Eventually a downstairs neighbor peeked out to see why were were fooling around with her lock box.  Luckily, it turned out she knows the owner of our unit.  After several calls the owner says we can break out the panel of the door  to get in. But we are a little  doubtful about that and double check and finally the owner decides to come  let us in.  But she has no  key either.  I suppose because she thinks  the property manager will ride to the rescue in an emergency like this.   So she and her boyfriend come  over, try some old key and then run off to get a ladder.  The boyfriend  climbs the ladder and can't get the screen off one  window.  Tries another window and SUCCESS.  We are in.  Only one and a half hours after we had retuned, hoping to spend an  evening  relaxing, playing cards, drinking  wine and eating brownies in our beach condo.  BLEH!!

Turns out keyless entry systems run on batteries and when batteries die you can't get in unless you've stored a backup key somewhere.  Or have a property management team on call.

The real topper was when the property management texted me at 6:00 AM to check if we'd gotten in.  HELLO!  Can you figure that either we are at another location or we got in but in either case we are on vacation and are probably asleep?

Up side is they refunded us about one night's rate.   Not sure yet if I think that is enough.