The hotel in question. (Credit: Christiana L)
“If you ever get kidnapped, make sure you leave your cell phone on,” he said. “That way, we can track you.”
I was having dinner this past Monday with a friend who works for the FBI. He has a trait I’ve observed to be common among members of the law enforcement community. Namely, threads of ordinary conversation will remind him of something that happened on the job, and he’ll immediately interject some loosely related piece of safety advice.
You stop at a red light, maybe, and he starts teaching you evasive driving maneuvers, or you’re at a restaurant and he wants you to identify the patron at the bar most likely to be concealing an unlicensed firearm. The kidnapping advice popped into his mind during my demonstration of the features on my new cell phone. Cell phone, GPS tracking, kidnapping. A reasonably linear thought process, I suppose.
After my FBI friend and I parted ways, I drove two hours north to Pennsylvania, where I’d be speaking the next morning at a nearby high school. My hotel was listed on my travel itinerary as “The Yorktowne Hotel,” which I figured must be a typo since the city itself was simply called “York.” But when I arrived, I discovered a one-hundred-year-old building with “The Yorktowne Hotel” written on the marquee. Why, I wondered, had the hotel’s original management felt “The York Hotel” to be an inadequate name? Did they think “The Yorktowne Hotel” sounded more expensive due to it’s additional five letters, including the silent “e” tacked gratuitously on the end? Were they perhaps envious of New York City when compared to their more feebly named municipality, York?
It was already close to midnight, but I can never sleep the night before a speech, so after checking into my room I departed for a walk through downtown York. About half an hour later, I found myself in a distinctly different sort of neighborhood than the one where I’d begun. Blades of grass peaked through cracks in the sidewalk and most of the ground floor windows in the row houses lining the street were covered by sheets of naked plywood. Read More
