Tuesday, September 30, 2025
7:50 a.m. Room 407 Crossroads Hotel
Chow Kit, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
I don’t have any big stories to tell this morning, but there have been a few changes since yesterday. For one thing, I’m in a different hotel. I won’t call it a new hotel because I’ve stayed here before. I’m in a Standard Twin room at the Crossroads Hotel, which is just around the corner from the Raja Bot, where I was staying before. I moved mainly because I just felt like a change. I thought it would be fun. But I also wasn’t able to renew my exact room at the Raja Bot. I could have extended my stay there, but to do so, I would have had to pack up and move into a different room. And if my day is going to be dominated by this need to pack up and then essentially check out and check back in, I might as well look around and see if it made sense to change not only my room but my hotel. At that time, I still had hope that my Lazada package was going to be delivered before I left. I got the notification from Lazada at 10:08 on Sunday morning that “Your parcel is on the way.” So I figured it would arrive on Sunday in the afternoon or even before noon. After I received that notification, I rushed back to the Raja Bot just in case it would show up within the hour. I was having brunch with Daryl and the boys at the time, and they all went on to have coffee somewhere else. But I said goodbye to them and returned to the Raja Bot to await delivery. Sadly, nothing happened. It is now 46 hours since I got that message, and the package has not arrived. As far as I can tell, it hasn’t moved at all. I still don’t even know where it is. That notification on Sunday morning was the last update I got. And everything else remains the same: contacting Lazada is impossible and the tracking number still doesn’t work. Lazada has a customer service firewall in the shape of a chatbot that they call CLEO. The only way to communicate with Lazada is with CLEO. Not surprisingly, CLEO is useless. It can’t do anything and it doesn’t know anything. It just repeats whatever information is on the computer system. For example, it tells me to just use the tracking number to find out where the package is. I tell CLEO that the tracking number doesn’t work, and it just repeats the instructions to use the tracking number.
I played around with CLEO the chatbot a little bit just for fun, and I pretended it was something I could have an actual conversation with, and I said things like, “You’re not listening to me. I told you that the tracking number doesn’t work. I’ve put it into a half dozen different tracking apps, and they all say that my package can’t be located and the the tracking number is invalid.” And then CLEO just apologizes for any inconvenience caused and thanks me for my patience.
Then I would write to CLEO and say, “You just thanked me for my patience, but right now I’m out of patience. You’re not helping me at all.” And CLEO would say, “I’m very sorry you feel that way. Rest assured that we are working tirelessly to help you. Have a great day!”
And I would write back, “How can I have a great day when you can’t even answer the most basic question about my package? I’m having a terrible day.” And then CLEO would give me a list of prepared issues, and say, “Please choose one of the following to help us understand how to help you.” And we would just go around and around in circles. I knew CLEO couldn’t do anything. I was just bored and entertaining myself to see what CLEO would say. I had read in various places that if you annoyed CLEO long enough, the chat bot will automatically escalate the chat to contact with an actual human being. But I guess I was never annoying enough because that never happened. Every time I went back to CLEO, it was just as useless as before.
I find it fascinating that all of this drama could be avoided if Lazada added just one simple piece of information to their system. If, after the failed delivery, the system said, “We will try to deliver your package again within 1 to 3 business days” then I could relax and get on with my life. That’s the only information I need, but it doesn’t even say that. So I have no assurance that anything is happening. I don’t know if what is happening is normal or if my package is stuck or lost. Of course, it would also be nice if the tracking number worked. And it would be nice if their updates and notifications were less confusing. Sending me a notification that says “Your parcel is on the way” is not a great idea if the package is in fact not going to be delivered for another 3 business days. I understand that multiverses are all the rage and that I live on Planet Doug. But it seems like in any universe and even on Planet Doug, “on the way” never means “three days from now”. Can you imagine a friend meeting you for coffee, and they say “I’m on the way!” And then they show up four days later? That’s not my definition of “on the way”.
I’m seeing in comments that people feel Shopee is the better choice. People are saying that Shopee is the way to go if you want more reliable deliveries and better communication. I will definitely NOT use Lazada again anytime soon. If I decide I need some other little techno gizmo delivered, I will go back to looking in actual stores. Failing that, I will use Shopee. I’ve never used Shopee that I can remember. I just checked, and I don’t have an account with them. But I’ll definitely create one now after this experience with Lazada. I’m also extremely tired of the Lazada advertisements. Since I’m waiting for this package to be delivered, I had to turn on Lazada notifications and take my phone off silent mode, and the constant beeping and buzzing and noises my phone makes as Lazada floods my life with ads is overwhelming. I wish I could limit my notifications on Lazada such that I only received important notifications regarding deliveries. But that doesn’t seem to be possible. Lazada appears to say that if you want to get notifications about the time and date (and century?) of your delivery, you MUST also receive five advertisements an hour. A funny thing is that I keep getting ads about various tripods and selfie grips that are for sale on Lazada. That’s one thing their CLEO is good at. CLEO knows that I ordered a tripod, so it must be something I’m interested in. “Oh, so you like tripods. Well, here are a hundred more you might like.” Sorry, CLEO. I already picked out the one I liked. Now I just need it to be delivered.
To get back to my hotel story, I did eventually decide that if I needed to pack up and change rooms anyway, I might as well also change hotels. And I looked around, and I saw that I could get a relatively good deal back at my old home, the Crossroads Hotel. It wasn’t the 39-ringgit per night deal that I got initially when I first discovered that hotel. But the price per night was in range with the prices at the Raja Bot. I think I finally got the Agoda price down to 53 ringgit. With the tourism tax and all the other taxes and the 5-ringgit “cleaning fee”, it came to 75 ringgit per night. That’s very much on the high end for me, but I did it anyway. A room at the Raja Bot would have cost the same, because they only had large family rooms left. AND the room at the Crossroads was much bigger, and it came with a minifridge and what they called a coffeemaker and other things.
On Monday morning, I was sill hoping that the parcel would arrive before the twelve noon checkout time. But that didn’t happen. And when I went down to the lobby to check out, I had to chat with the hotel clerk on duty and explain my situation and see if I could convince them to accept delivery (if and when it came) and hold it at the desk and I would come back and get it. I hate asking for favors like that. It feels like I am putting the hotel clerk on the spot, and this hotel clerk was clearly uncomfortable with the idea. I’d cleared it with the other front desk clerk, but he is a more easygoing fellow and we’ve had lots of chats about my YouTube channel and other things. The other front desk clerk is equally friendly and nice, but he is also a bit more by-the-book, and he instantly worried about this arrangement and did not want to take responsibility for any delivery meant for me when I was no longer a hotel guest. He was worried that he would have no way to contact me, etc. But I assured him that I could see if and when the package was delivered through the Lazada app. He did not need to contact me. In fact, I wasn’t expecting him to take any responsibility at all. I told him that at this point I didn’t care whether I ever received this package or not. If it showed up, fine. If it didn’t, equally fine. If I never saw this tripod or this parcel in my lifetime, that was fine with me. Eventually, I wore him down and he reluctantly agreed. Though I don’t think he quite understood what he was agreeing to.
After I officially checked out, I hung out in the lobby of the Raja Bot for a while. It was noon, and I had that annoying two-hour period between check-out and check-in to deal with. It was possible I could just go to the Crossroads and they’d let me check into a room early. But I didn’t know that for sure, and I was in no hurry to rush there. And I had the opportunity to chat with another foreigner. There was a young guy from America also checking out of the Raja Bot and moving to another hotel. He had a room booked at the Swing and Pillows, and he was moving there. But his check-in time was three p.m., so he had even more time to kill. I didn’t learn a lot about him, but I enjoyed our chat. We compared notes on all kinds of travel experiences, and I learned that he had been on the road as backpacker for somewhere between two and three years, and in that time, he had been to sixty-three countries. He surprised me with the breadth of his travels even within countries. He started listing off places within Malaysia that he had visited, such as places you don’t often hear about, such as Muar and Gopeng. He seemed to have been everywhere. And on Sumatra, he had been to Padang and Medan and even Banda Aceh. And we got to compare notes on our fun experiences in Indonesia.
After an hour or so, I said goodbye and slowly made my way over to the Crossroads. The first time I stayed at this hotel, I made a joke in my video about how dark and gloomy the lobby area was and how the stone-faced hotel clerk struck me as a potential serial killer. And that same stone-faced clerk was there this time, too, to check me in. And the entryway and the lobby and hallways were just as dark and gloomy. I noted what a stark contrast there was between the photos on Agoda and the reality. For the photos on Agoda, somebody had cleaned up the place and turned on the lights. Everything was bright and cheerful and welcoming. In reality, it seemed like a place you came to be murdered. The hotel clerk was again remarkably emotionless. I suppose I can’t really criticise him. He did his job. He checked me in. There was nothing to complain about. Yet, there was nothing to be happy about either. I did not feel welcome, that’s for sure. He seemed angry with me more than anything else, and he spoke in an abrupt yet very quiet way such that I couldn’t make out what he was saying. I wanted to ask him why in the world he accepted a job in the hospitality industry. Given his personality and cold and unfriendly demeanor, surely there were more suitable careers.
Luckily, I had stayed at this hotel before, so I knew the drill. I knew that they charged a super-annoying 5-ringgit cleaning fee. Rather than be annoyed at that, I had my 5-ringgit ready. And I knew they asked for a 50-ringgit deposit AND they gave you no receipt for that. So I was prepared for that particular annoyance as well. One hiccup came when I pulled out a photocopy of my passport for him. I hadn’t had to show my passport for a long time, so this was the first time I had to think about the fact that I had both my old passport number and my new one. I hadn’t updated the passport number on my Agoda account, so THAT’s the passport he would be looking for. And I gave him the photocopy of that passport hoping it wouldn’t matter. But he insisted on seeing the passport itself. I had to dig around in my bag and get it out. And while I did so, I wondered how this was going to turn out. This old passport was now cancelled. It had the corner cut off. It had the giant word “CANCELLED” stamped in red ink on every page. I figured he would notice that and refuse to accept it. And then I’d have to produce my new passport and explain how I’d just gotten a new one but it didn’t have my Malaysian visa stamp in it, etc. At that point, I figured that since I lived on Planet Doug, he would refuse to give me a room or he would call the police. But not being particularly invested in or excited about his job as a hotel front desk clerk, he barely glanced at my passport. He made a photocopy of it and handed it back. He never remarked on the fact that it was clearly cancelled and no longer a valid travel document.
And then I just ended up standing there. Everything was done. I was checked in. But he hadn’t given me a room key. So I waited patiently. There was one more step to this process. He had to assign a room and give me a room key. But he seemed uninterested in doing that. He sat back down in his chair and went back to staring off into space. I stood there at the desk unsure of what to do. Had he just forgotten this final vital step? Were we waiting for something? I stood there for what felt like a very long time. Any hotel clerk that was tuned into their job would pick up on the fact that their guest was still standing there and waiting for something. But this fellow had other things on his mind. Contemplating a new career? Serial killing?
Finally, I spoke up and I suggested to him what was probably happening. I said, “Is the room not ready?” He seemed startled that I was still there. And he looked at me like he was surprised to find himself in a hotel lobby. And he said, “Not ready.” And he looked away, presumably to contemplate more serial killing.
I was really surprised that it hadn’t occurred to him to tell me that my room wasn’t ready yet and I had to wait. I understood that he wasn’t very good at his job and he was remarkably uninterested in it. Yet, there’s a rhythm and a routine to checking into a hotel. He must have done it hundreds if not thousands of times. And the routine always ends with handing the guest their room key. That’s the final stage. And you’d think that NOT giving me my room key would prompt him to at least say the words to me, “Your room isn’t ready yet.” But he never said a word. I find that so hard to understand. I understand that the world is divided into people who care about customer service and doing a good job and people who don’t. But it’s remarkable that anyone could be so dramatically uninterested as this young man. How did he get this job? How does he keep it? Why does he keep it?
Of course, I had no problem waiting for my room to be ready. I just needed to be told that this was the situation. And now that this had been cleared up, I settled down in a comfortable chair in the lobby to wait. It was about 1:30, and I figured I had to wait about thirty minutes at the most, and that was fine with me. I spent the time looking around the lobby and at the other people milling about also waiting for their room to be ready or waiting until they had to leave for the airport or something like that. I noticed that most of the people seemed to be immigrant workers of one kind or another. I think this Crossroads Hotel and this neighborhood in general is popular with immigrant workers and their families. As a typical white dude, I was definitely the odd one out. And I wondered if this is why I found the customer service so lacking. I do find that people from most Asian countries, particularly immigrant workers, are much tougher than I am. They don’t come into a hotel expecting the lights to be on and for the hotel clerk to welcome them with a smile. I’m sure all these people were staying at the Crossroads for the same reason I was: it was one of the cheaper alternatives. They cared about the price, and that was about it. As long as the price was right, they didn’t care whether the hotel clerk had graduated from a hospitality course and greeted them with a warm welcome and did things like inform them about where the cold and hot water dispenser might be.
Shortly before two, my room was ready, and I got my room key. I got room 408 and I rode the elevator up to the fourth floor. The room turned out to be an interesting beast, and its nature sparked a whole new round of Planet Doug-style thoughts. The first thing that struck me was that the room was much nicer and bigger than I expected. The first time I stayed here, I somehow ended up with a Queen Deluxe room, and it was really nice. And then my friend Jason got a room here as well, and his room was AWFUL. For the price and compared to my room, it was a dump. He used up an entire package of wet wipes just wiping down the various surfaces and floors and fixtures to make it livable. His room was small and uncomfortable. The bathroom area was falling apart. Of course, it had no window and little of anything else. And during his time there, the air conditioner stopped working completely. So I thought that what Jason got was a normal room. And my Queen Deluxe luxury was an anomaly.
And this time, I didn’t get a Queen Deluxe at a good price. I got what they called a Standard Twin, and I didn’t know what the room would be like. I thought perhaps it would be like Jason’s room. But Jason must have gotten an even lower class because his room was awful and my Standard Twin was pretty sweet. It struck me as quite large. Spacious even. The furniture was classic perhaps 90’s decor or 80’s or something like that. The bathroom was awesome with lots of space, a separate shower area, great water pressure and hot water, and big, tall mirrors. I was quite pleased on first impressions, and I was glad that I had moved from the Raja Bot to here. This room had character.
However, there WERE some issues. For one thing, none of the items that were listed for this room actually existed. The main reason I had chosen this particular room and made the decision to switch hotels was that this room came with a mini-fridge. A Planet Doug Mystery Benefactor had sent me a care package including a liter of milk and a large bottle of premium iced cafe latte. And these needed to be kept refrigerated. But here I was in my new room, and I could see the space in the furniture where the mini-fridge was supposed to be, but it was just an empty space.
This discrepancy between how hotel rooms are described and how they are in real life always sparks some thoughts in my brain. For one thing, I don’t want to come across as the guy complaining about discomforts and things not working. I’m not that guy. I’m perfectly happy living in cheap dumps. I have spent much of my life living in what some people might call squalor. I don’t need comfort. Yet, I wonder how hotels can get away with what are essentially total lies. They may not be intending to lie, but it still ends being a lie. To be honest, I sort of suspected this would happen. And when I booked this room, I took a screenshot of how this room was described on Agoda. And this is what is supposed to be in this room according to the listing:
- Private bathroom
- Hair dryer
- Shower
- Wi-Fi (free)
- Blackout curtains
- Mini bar
- Free bottled water
- Coffee/tea maker
- Refrigerator
- Window
THAT’s the room I booked for 53 ringgit. But other than the bathroom, shower, and Wi-Fi, NONE of that is here. There is certainly no fridge, hair dryer, or coffee maker. There are also no blackout curtains and no window to even put them on. There isn’t even a bottle of water. So my question is how do companies get away with this? We normal people in our lives can’t do this. We can’t promise our employers and landlords all kinds of things and then NOT give them. We MUST come through on our end. If we don’t, we get fined and arrested and fired and things like that. Yet companies and corporations and hotels can do whatever they want and we guests and customers just have to take it.
I wonder if we have just become docile, particularly in the world of computers and online book and chatbots. We just expect hotels to lie to us, and we do nothing about it. They put fake pictures on their Agoda listings. They say the room has a mini-fridge when it doesn’t. They say the room has a window when it doesn’t, and we just accept it as the way the world works. And this is particularly true of the low-budget world. I guess if I were staying at a 5-star hotel for 500-ringgit a night, I would stand up for my rights. If I didn’t get the room I paid for, I’d go to the front desk and ask for a room change. If something was broken in the room and things didn’t work, I’d tell the hotel staff and expect them to fix it. But when you stay at a low-budget hotel, you come in expecting things to be broken or missing, and you just let it go. But where do you draw the line?
A funny thing is that later in the day, I left my room and went to the elevator to go down, and while I was waiting for the elevator, I was looking around and in the stairway, I saw a stack of three mini-fridges. Obviously over the years, the mini-fridges had broken down, and they just tossed them into the stairway and left them there to rot. But the rooms all still proudly list a mini-fridge among their facilities. And I suppose they could argue that there ARE mini-fridges. They just don’t work and they aren’t actually in the room. They are sort of room-adjacent.
Light bulbs are also a thing with me. I’ve talked about that a lot in my videos. As has come up multiple times, I even buy and bring my own lightbulbs so that I can use them in my hotel room to make the place a bit more cheerful. The thing is that low-budget hotels will slowly replace all their regular light bulbs with low energy very dim light bulbs. I guess it saves them money on their electricity bill. But it makes the rooms so gloomy and sad. So I like to unscrew their light bulbs and put in my own 100-watt bulbs and brighten the place up a bit. And this room is no different. It’s a big, spacious and potentially pleasant room. But it is let down by how dark and gloomy it is. There simply aren’t enough lights. And the light fixtures that do exist have sad little low-energy bulbs that emit a weak yellow glow and that’s about it. I find myself squinting as I look around the room to try to make out what’s going on.
But there is one thing about this room that I REALLY don’t like. I can live with the low-wattage bulbs. I can live with the missing fridge and coffee maker. I just drank all the milk and all the cafe latte yesterday afternoon and evening before it spoiled. I have my own kettle to boil water for coffee. I have my own water bottles, and I go out and fill them up at water dispensers. But one thing that bothers me is that Room 408 is connected by an internal door to Room 409 next door. And that door is thin, so I can hear everything going on in that room. And I HATE that. I end up feeling uncomfortable in my own room because I’m so worried about disturbing the person or people next door. I normally listen to Podcasts on my Bluetooth speaker but now I can’t because I know the sound will carry over to the next room. I tiptoe around being careful not to make any noise.
And then I always end up paying the price for that because even though I try to be considerate of the people in the next room, the people in that room NEVER are. They usually make just as much noise as they like, shouting into smartphones, playing the TV loudly, and worst of all: coughing and hacking and coughing and hacking. There is just a single man staying in that room, I think. I’ve never seen him, but I think he is an elderly man. Luckily, he’s relatively quiet. He doesn’t scream into his smartphone (so far). He doesn’t play the TV at high volume (so far). There are no children running around and screaming. He doesn’t slam doors. But he’s ill because he is coughing a lot. And I hear it all through the night. It just makes me aware that he is over there and listening to every sound from over here.
Worse than that, he’s a smoker. He’s not supposed to smoke in his room. Nobody is. But other then me, people don’t pay attention to the rules in these low-budget hotels, and they smoke anyway. And this guy has been smoking regularly. And I have a funny relationship with cigarette smoke. If I’m sitting at a bar having a beer with a friend and that friend is smoking, it doesn’t bother me at all. People can smoke right beside me, and I’m fine with it. BUT when cigarette smoke gets diluted and it seeps under the door and into my room, I have a powerful allergic reaction to it. My eyes burn, my nose starts running, I start sneezing and sneezing, and my throat becomes raw and sore, and I can’t sleep. It’s like thin smoke from the room next door makes me a wreck while full cigarette smoke has no effect.
Anyway, I asked earlier the hypothetical question of where does one draw the line? I can go down to the front desk and show the clerk the listing for my hotel room and demand to know, “Where is my mini-fridge? Where is my coffee maker? Where is my hair dryer and complimentary bottle of water? For that matter, where is my window?” But it’s a fool’s errand. The hotel desk clerk doesn’t know and doesn’t care. I can demand that they change and update the Agoda listing and quit lying to their guests. But they won’t. I can write a negative review on Agoda and on Google Maps. But what’s the point? You might as well try to hold back a tsunami with your hands. Plus, I don’t want to be one of “those” people. I’m in a hotel filled with immigrant workers who smoke and shout into their smartphones and slam doors. That’s how they live and behave normally and naturally. I don’t want to be that annoying white dude from Canada going down to the front desk and complaining about things. You gotta adapt and just accept the world as it is rather than fight against everything. You’ll wear yourself out doing that.
But even I have my limits. And I have to say that this connecting door to the neighboring room and the cigarette smoke is tough to deal with. It really makes my life much worse to have my eyes burning, my throat sore and be unable to sleep. But I don’t think there is much I can do about it. I could ask to be moved to a different room, but that is like walking blind into a minefield. Chances are that a different room will have a new much worse unpleasant surprise. There’s no guarantee that a new room will be a better room. And even getting rid of the connecting door doesn’t solve the cigarette problem. The same thing happens when people smoke in the hallways, and the smoke seeps under the door from there. And to change rooms, I have to pack up again and my whole day will revolve around moving out of this room at noon and waiting two hours until two for the next room to be ready. And it could end up being a worse room than this one. So I will just stay put. The first thing I did when I moved into this room was roll up a towel and put it on the floor at the base of the door. That will keep out some of the smoke. Maybe I can pick up a roll of packing tape and seal the entire door. To be honest, I would do that, but I don’t want to end up damaging the walls and peeling off paint and leaving sticky tape residue.
Well, I did not intend to write over 5,000 words, but I did. This is the normal type of journal entry that I would write in the morning before I started my YouTube life. In fact, I would continue writing much longer because I have several stories and thoughts left that I haven’t gotten to. But I must move on to YouTube-related activities, so I will leave it there for now and get on with the rest of my day.