Saturday, October 4, 2025
8:32 a.m. Room 307 Crossroads Hotel
Chow Kit, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
THE SMOKER IN ROOM 408
A few things have happened over the last few days. I’m still in Kuala Lumpur. I keep uncovering new things I want to do or need to do while I’m here. One thing I did was to move to a new room here at the Crossroads Hotel. THAT was a major relief. My previous room, Room 407, was a Standard Twin, and it had a connecting door to Room 408. A lot of the rooms here have doors that connect them to neighboring rooms. These rooms are always a problem because these thin doors allow sound to carry, and you hear everything going on in the room next door. And then I feel self-conscious about making noise. I’m usually very conscious of that, even in a normal room. I try to be considerate of neighbors, and I don’t make excessive noise or slam doors or anything like that. But I do like to occasionally play a podcast over a Bluetooth speaker, and I occasionally need to play audio over my laptop’s speakers. But with a thin connecting door, I didn’t feel comfortable doing even that. I ended up tiptoeing around my room like it was filled with sleeping babies, and I never got comfortable.
But the sound wasn’t the real problem. The real problem was that the man in the room next to mine was a heavy smoker, and he smoked day and night in his room. And that cigarette smoke poured into my room. Of course, as soon as I moved into the room, I put a towel on the floor to try to cover up the gap at the bottom of the door. But doing that has more of a psychological effect than anything else. You feel like you’re blocking something, but it doesn’t work at all. The smoke filled my room 24-hours-a-day, and my eyes burned, my throat was raw and sore, my nose started running, and I sneezed all the time. I don’t know how this works, but if I sit beside someone at a table and they smoke, it doesn’t bother me at all. But when smoke seeps into my hotel room from outside, that lesser amount of smoke sets off a strong allergic reaction in my body. It’s just awful, and I find it hard to do anything. It’s nearly impossible to sleep. And I lived in dread of the dude lighting up a new cigarette and the smoke just pouring in.
I never quite know what to do in these situations. In movies, people stand up for themselves. They knock on the door to the neighboring room and talk to the occupants and ask them to stop smoking, stop playing the TV at high volume at 2 a.m., stop slamming doors, and stop doing all the things that are bothering everyone around them. But in the real world it’s not so easy. I don’t like telling other people what to do. When people do annoying things around me, I simply move away from them. I change my life and my situation to get away from them. I would feel bad if I demanded that this man stop smoking in his room. I don’t want to make him unhappy and deny him the pleasure of smoking. And this feeling becomes stronger when you are a foreigner overseas. I never want to be that foreigner who wanders around another country complaining all the time and trying to change people and tell them what to do and how to live. In most countries I visit, people aren’t sensitive to noise and slamming doors and cigarette smoke. That’s a Doug-thing if not a Canadian thing. There are tons of normal day-to-day behaviors in other countries that are bothersome and make no sense to me. But that’s the norm in those places, and it’s not logical or smart to wander around in a constant state of annoyance and try to change people. It’s just who they are and what they do.
But to be honest, I was pretty annoyed. I had ended up paying more than I wanted to for this room. Accommodation in Kuala Lumpur seems to be getting more expensive all the time, and the low budget hotels are raising their prices. It’s a struggle to find budget-friendly rooms, and I eventually had no choice but to bite the bullet and pay what felt like a lot for this room. And bad feelings started early because the room I booked on Agoda was supposed to have a fridge and hair dryer and all the other little luxuries. I paid for THAT room in particular because it was the only room available, but I comforted myself by imagining a life of luxury with a refrigerator. Yet, the room was bare. None of those things were present. So right out of the gate, I was put in an uncomfortable position. The room I booked online clearly had all these items listed. In particular, it was supposed to have a window and a refrigerator. Yet, the refrigerator was missing and there was no window. And I knew complaining about that would just lead to frustration. The hotel clerk would just stare at me in confusion and do nothing and be able to do nothing. It’s normal for hotels to lie in their online listings. It’s just how things are. And if you go around the world constantly complaining when your room doesn’t have the facilities it is supposed to have, you are setting yourself up for a miserable time. And then the smoking started. So I sat in the room just fuming and feeling bad.
I often wonder about the people in the world who smoke in hotel rooms, slam doors, make noise all night, throw garbage on the ground, and all these things. Are they aware of their behavior? Do they know that they are bothering all the people around them? The other day, I was on the platform of the monorail, and it was a relatively busy time. The train pulled up, and there were clearly lots of people on the train wanting to get off. Of course, I stood far to the side to allow people to get off first before I got on. That’s just common sense and polite behavior. But other people stood right in front of the door, and I was annoyed with them before the doors even opened. There was one couple in particular that planted themselves directly in front of the door. The man stood behind his wife, and when the doors started to open, you could see that his wife started to move to the side. But the man stopped her and pushed her from behind and forced her to dive straight towards the opening gap between the doors. And then the inevitable happened. The people trying to get on the train met the people trying to get off, and nobody could move and there was chaos. And I wonder about this husband and wife. Sure, they were first on the train and did get a seat. And they can look around and be proud of themselves that they fought for themselves and got an advantage. Yet, they were horribly rude and they caused trouble for everyone around them. And I wonder if this man knows who he is. Is he aware of what he is doing? And he just doesn’t care? I often want to walk up to these people and just have a polite conversation with them. I want to ask this man about what he just did. Did he do it on purpose? Did he KNOW he had caused so much trouble for other people? And does he know that as he goes about his normal day, lots of people around him end up disliking him? We all go home thinking about that horrible man on the monorail. And I wonder if rude people ever pay a price for their behavior. Maybe they go through life completely happy and satisfied – doing whatever they want to do regardless of how it affects people around them. Maybe they never know the trouble they caused. Or do they know and they just don’t care?
But again, there is always the question of being a guest in a foreign country. It’s not my role to try to change how people in other countries behave. I was surprised that none of the Malaysians trying to get off the train showed any annoyance with this man. People just accept this type of behavior as normal for the most part and nobody seems to get upset. So, I’m the outlier. Anyway, I did not knock on the door of Room 408 and ask the man to stop smoking. And I tried to adopt a calm mood and attitude and simply accept the situation and get on with my life. But it got harder and harder as time passed and I was unable to sleep and had trouble doing anything because of my burning eyes and running nose and raw throat. A funny thing is that in all these situations, you can’t help but sit there or lie there and imagine things you could do. Should I write a note and slip it under his door? Should I write a note and tape it to his door? Should I rat him out to the hotel staff? Should I slam my fist against the door and say loud angry things about cigarette smoke?
In the end, I DID say something to the staff at the hotel. I came up with a passive-aggressive strategy that would allow me to complain and yet I wasn’t really complaining. I was having a casual conversation with the hotel clerk about something else, and then I slipped a “by the way” into the conversation. I knew I was being weak and passive aggressive, but I couldn’t help it. I was pretty annoyed and tired. And I said “By the way, when I check out of my room and you smell cigarette smoke, it wasn’t me. I don’t smoke. All that smoke is coming from the room next door.”
The thing is that you’re not supposed to smoke in hotel rooms anymore. Most hotels will hit you with a big fine if you check out and they smell smoke in your room. So it was reasonable to tell this hotel clerk that my room stinks of cigarette smoke BUT it wasn’t me. So I was trying to avoid a fine. But, of course, what I was really doing was lodging a complaint without officially lodging a complaint.
It was weak sauce, of course, but I’m glad I did it just because of the hotel clerk’s humorous and typical response: He said he would give me an extra towel and I could block the gap at the bottom of the door. Clearly, the hotel didn’t care if people smoked in their room. There were signs saying that you weren’t allowed to smoke, but it wasn’t enforced. It’s just not that type of hotel. It’s a bit rough around the edges and they let people do what they want for the most part.
Anyway, I didn’t intend to go on such a long rant on this topic. What I wanted to say was simply that I moved to a new room. I extended my stay at this hotel, and to get away from the smoking man, I made sure to book a different type of room. That would force the hotel to assign me a new room. The smoking room was a Standard Twin, and for my new room, I booked a Queen Deluxe. Oddly enough, the Queen Deluxe was cheaper than the Standard Twin. I don’t know why. Unfortunately, the way the rooms work, the Queen Deluxe also has a connecting door to another room. So even though I was moving into a new room, I would still have a connecting door to a neighboring room. There was no getting away from that. I was just rolling the dice and hoping that the person or people in the new connecting room would NOT be heavy smokers or be incredibly noisy. Plus, if there was an issue with smoke, at least I’d be able to open the window.
Of course, I’m the one that ends up being inconvenienced by all this. Because of the smoker and having to change rooms, I had to spend a chunk of the morning packing up and getting organized. Then at noon, I had to go down to the lobby with my bags and officially check out. And then I had to wait two and a half hours for the new room to be cleaned and ready. And then I moved back in and unpacked. So I kind of wasted a day just because I wanted to change rooms. Meanwhile, the rude smoker was able to relax in his room all day undisturbed. The rude people always seem to benefit.
Of course, moving into a new room is always a bit of an adventure. I escaped one room with the smoker and very dim lighting and no windows. And I was assigned Room 307, a room I was in before. When I was in this room before, I liked it. It has large windows, a nice queen-sized bed, a kettle, and a refrigerator. The odd thing is that the Agoda listing for this Queen Deluxe room does NOT list a refrigerator or kettle. The Standard Twin was supposed to have a fridge and kettle but didn’t. This Queen Deluxe is NOT supposed to have a fridge and kettle, yet it DOES. Who can figure these things out?
Unfortunately, Room 307 has developed its own problem. The air conditioner makes a very loud noise. It sounds like it is going to explode at any minute. It’s buzzing and roaring and the sound is so loud that it is hard to concentrate or sleep. Once again, I have to make a choice, and neither choice is a good one. Of course, in the normal world, you’d tell the hotel about the problem and they would fix it. But in a low budget hotel that sort of thing doesn’t happen. And if you complain about the broken air conditioner, you are setting yourself up for endless hassle as they have to come to your room and investigate. And there will usually be five or six of these visits as different people knock on your door and then want to come in and play around with the air conditioner. And they think they have fixed it by just jiggling it and turning it off and on. But the moment they leave, the buzzing returns. And then there will be long discussions and endless communication about when a repair person will come. Essentially, you will make your life miserable for days with all the hassle surrounding trying to get the air conditioner to stop making this racket. So it’s better to just live with it.
Luckily, I am accustomed to sleeping with ear plugs, and I just use ear plugs at night to drown out the air conditioner. And during the day, I put in earphones plugged into my laptop. I just ignore the loud buzzing as best I can.
CREDIT CARD FRAUD
Another problem that came my was yet another episode of credit card fraud. I don’t think there was any actual fraud. I don’t think there were any fraudulent charges made on my credit card. But to my horror, I came back to Room 307 and the roaring air conditioner last night to discover an email from my bank in Canada from the “Fraud Detection” unit saying that my credit card was at risk and I had to call them as soon as possible.
My heart sank. There is nothing in my life that affects me more than a problem like this with the necessity of calling my bank. It is so stressful and difficult and time consuming. It’s exhausting. And my instinct was just to go bed. It was late. I was super tired. The last thing I wanted to do was spend two hours on the phone trying to get this sorted out. But I forced myself to be an adult and just deal with it. If I just went to bed, I’d be stressed out all night and it would be difficult to sleep. So I got prepared as best I could by gathering up all the essential information and cards and documents. I made sure my phone was fully charged and that I had a good Internet connection. And then I took several huge deep breaths and dialed the number for my bank.
I suppose things didn’t go as badly as they could have. And the end result was acceptable. However, it wasn’t easy, and there were many twists and turns. I had to get through the automated system first by entering my credit card number and then selecting the appropriate line based on my problem. And then I was on hold for a long time. My heart was pounding and I tried hard to take steady breaths and slow my heart rate and relax. Finally, someone came on the line, and of course I had trouble understanding them. It’s so hard for me to understand what people are saying on the phone. And I worry that by constantly not understanding and asking for clarification and getting things wrong, I’m sending signals that I’m a criminal. I know I sound nervous, but I’m not nervous because I’m a criminal. I’m nervous because contacting my bank is always so stressful.
And it didn’t take long to run into a problem. The thing is that everything about me is wrong. They expect me to be in Canada living at the address listed with my bank. And I’m terrified that if they learn the truth of where I am and how long I’ve been outside of Canada that they will instantly shut down everything. I will lose my one bank account and my one credit card, and my life will essentially be over. So I try to get through these conversations with my bank without betraying that I’m calling them from another country and that I don’t really live in Canada anymore.
Unfortunately, in this case it wasn’t possible. The man I was talking to assumed I was at my home in Canada and he wanted to send me a security code via my home phone number. And I had to confess that I was calling him from the other side of the world and I couldn’t answer that phone. As expected, that caused a big problem. I could hear him take a big breath, and he said something about how that changed everything. And I would not be able to go through the regular security and identify verification checks and systems. He would have to pass me on to another department. I was now fully panic-stricken, and he put me back on hold and transferred my call to somewhere else.
Luckily, I wasn’t on hold for an hour each time as usually happens. I was on hold long enough to start freaking out and getting tired, but it wasn’t a crazy long time. And then another man came on the line. And now he had to verify that I really was who I said I was. And this strikes me as a very strange aspect of the modern world. I have security in layers on everything in my life. We all do. And this security involves fingerprints, facial recognition, complex 32-character passwords stored in a high-security password manager, etc. We live in a world of DNA identification and retinal scans. Yet, when there is a problem with my credit card, the only way I can fix it is by making a phone call. And the bank is essentially just receiving a random phone call (from Malaysia) from an unknown phone number from a guy claiming to be me. You can’t ask for anything LESS secure. It is the absolute least secure method of communicating of all available methods. Yet, this phone call is the only way to get this problem cleared up.
So now this man at the bank has to put me through a series of tests to decide whether or not I am really me. It’s ridiculous when you think about it. There are countless movies and TV shows where they are trying to figure out if a person really is who they say they are, and they try to ask that person a question to which only they know the answer. And this is what this guy at the bank is doing. He’s basically conducting an exam to test me on knowledge about myself. And then he makes a judgement call about whether I passed the test or not. I felt like a student doing final exams. He starts with the easy questions: What is my full name? What is my phone number? Then he asks me for my complete address. I had made sure to have all this information at my fingertips in advance, and I felt very proud of myself that I was able to rattle all this off and sound convincing. And each time I got the answer right, the man said, “Perfect!” And I felt like a student being praised by their teacher for getting the answer right. I could feel that I wanted his approval.
But then things got more difficult. I got all the biographical questions right. But he wanted to know what my current balance was in my checking account. The problem with answering that question is that to get that information, I needed to use the banking app, which was on the phone that I was using to talk to him! I tried to explain that problem to him, but it wasn’t anything he could fix. He needed answers to these questions. They had to be the correct answers. If not, there was nothing he could do. I had to get the answers, and it wasn’t his problem how I did it.
Then I realized I could access my banking app through a second phone. Unfortunately, that phone was packed away somewhere, and I would have to find it, get it out, turn it on and wait for it to boot up. And THEN I would have to log on to my banking app from that phone. I asked the banking guy if he didn’t mind waiting while I did all that, and he said it was fine. He just needed the answers. So now I’m stumbling around my room holding one phone to my ear and trying to find my second phone and then turning it on with one hand and then I have to somehow log in to my banking app with one hand.
Then, of course, when I tried to launch the banking app, I was told that there was a new version of the app and I had to download and install it! I didn’t have a choice. The update was mandatory, and I had to update to the new version. Now I had to tell the banking guy that it was going to take longer because I had to update the banking app first. And I didn’t know how long that would take. More and more, I felt like I was a criminal and I thought this guy would start to become suspicious. Why was it so hard and taking so long for this guy to just tell me how much money was in his checking account? It sounded like I was a criminal stalling for time while my hacker buddies were trying to get the info.
After what felt like forever, the banking app was updated and I was able to log in. I breathed a sigh of relief. And then I was able to answer all his questions. He asked for the balance of my checking account, my savings account, and my credit card. And then he asked detailed questions about a lot of the credit card transactions going back many months. He wanted to know how much the charge was on this or that date and what the charge was for. He went so far back in time, that I couldn’t even see the transactions on the app anymore. I had to go by memory, and I could feel him becoming suspicious again as I was just guessing what this or that charge could have been for. There were transactions in Indonesia and in Malaysia and I had to remember what I was doing six months ago at that time and where I was.
The bank guy was very good, by the way. He was professional and patient, but also friendly and kind of chatty. I think they made it part of their job to be chatty and able to indulge in small talk while doing their work. And he helped me through this process and waited patiently and listened to me while I babbled about inane things. And finally, we got to the end of his questions, and he decided that I really was who I said I was. And then we got to the bad news: my credit card was cancelled. One thing I’ve learned is that this is an automatic process. It’s a knee jerk reaction of the world of credit cards. If you call your bank to even ask a question about a possible fraudulent charge on your card, that’s it. The card is instantly cancelled. You have no choice in the matter. And in this case, the bank’s fraud detection unit had flagged my account. The guy I was talking to was in a different department, so he didn’t know the details. But the second I placed the phone call, that was it for my credit card. Cancelled. It’s automatic and instantaneous.
AND since I live on Planet Doug, I now faced the problem of having this new credit card delivered to an address in Canada while I am in Malaysia. And I will have to rely on people in Canada to help me get it. So I will have no valid credit card until the new one is delivered. PLUS, since I live on Planet Doug, there is a postal service strike going on in Canada. Postal workers are out on strike, so they don’t know how long it will take for the card to be mailed to my address in Canada.
Once all of this was taken care of and I had managed to calm down enough to go to bed, it was 2 in the morning. And then I was so worked up, I wasn’t able to go to sleep. So even though I had moved into the wonderful smoke-free room 307, I still didn’t get any sleep. Things have been a bit out of control and busy in my life lately.
TOUCH’NO’GO VISA CARD
On the very positive side, just as I lost my actual credit card, I gained a debit card. I can’t remember now how I stumbled across this fact, but I discovered that there was a possibility of getting a Visa card issued for my Malaysian Touch’n’Go eWallet. At first, I just assumed this was a pipe dream. People constantly tell me about all these amazing financial tools I can use. But it always turns out that for one reason or another I was not eligible. You have to be a citizen of Malaysia to do it or you have to physically be in Canada. You can’t do these things when you are in the country on a tourist visa and have no permanent status as a resident.
However, I heard about this Touch’n’Go Visa card, and then when I clicked on the “card” button in the app, I was taken to a very simple page where it looked like I would be able to get one. All I needed to do was fill out one simple form and pay a 15-ringgit fee. And then, boom, I had a Visa card. Of course, this isn’t a true credit card. You can’t buy things on this card and run up a bill. It’s a bank card or debit card. But it is connected to Touch’n’Go directly, and with this card number, you can pay for things online. It functions very much like a credit card in that there is a card number with a security code. And you enter that info online just like you would with a full credit card. And if you get the physical card itself, you can even use it at an ATM to withdraw cash from your eWallet.
I couldn’t believe it when I discovered this. I don’t have the card yet. And I haven’t tried to use the account online yet, but in theory, I’ll be able to access Touch’n’Go through an ATM in Malaysia and even in other countries. I used a friend’s address to have the card delivered, and to my amazement, it was out for delivery very quickly and it has already arrived. I am meeting my friend for breakfast tomorrow, and he will be able to give it to me. This could be perfect timing. Since my credit card has been cancelled, I can’t book rooms on Agoda anymore. But, in theory, I will be able to use this new Touch’n’Go card instead. So I’m not completely stuck.
I was so happy to find out about this possibility. It makes me feel like a grownup to have another payment option like this.