This poor page was sitting half-finished in one tab while I got around half a dozen other comics started and finished in another.  Has AWA 2023 set the record for the most drawn-out set of comics yet?  I mean, it’s definitely up there.  (Also, it didn’t help that, despite taking a STUPID number of “generic background” pictures all weekend, I still wound up with next to no coverage of the actual hotel room itself, which explains a lot about how the final page turned out)

But yeah, two things: First, I’ve actually had key cards die on me a LOT over the years.  Like, more than should be normal for one person.  Son on the one hand it was strangely comforting to have the problem definitively turn out to be something ELSE for one.  Apparently my personal demagnetizing field isn’t THAT strong after all.

But that brings us to the OTHER thing: the fact that stuff was falling apart.  It should hopefully be clear at which point this comic starts getting silly for comedic effect, but the door/phone combo was completely legit.  What’s more, I feel okay making the rest of the jokes, because the general vibe of the hotel as a whole was a lo more ragged than I remember it being in previous years.  I mean, I’ve obviously been in worse hotels recently, but still.  When one of the two main escalators in the lobby is all torn up and busted all weekend, it kind of sets a bad tone for everything else.  And I bring all this up in order to revisit something I was saying about the hotel earlier.  Could the whole reason the staff were so much more touchy about keeping con goers from spending too much time around the hotel because they’d slashed the maintenance budget so bad that they couldn’t afford to clean up after us?  To reiterate: the Cobb Galleria is apparently finally getting ready to tear down the old mall and replace it with new stuff… something I’d always heard they were reluctant to do because that much construction would hurt business over on the hotel side.  And that just happens to be the point where they suddenly can’t afford to keep the phones working?  I dunno, it could just be me trying to hard to find some sort of pattern in the utter chaos surrounding me, but it WOULD explain how much more… antsy the hotel staff seemed this year.