bunsen_h

I.--- is in hospital, and doing poorly.  Since I'm burned out from a couple of nights of terrible sleep, I put together a package of items she needs from home, and tried to arrange a taxi to deliver it to her hospital room.  This is something that we've done many times before.  But this evening, the dispatcher I reached at West Way had trouble taking down the address of our house, and when I told him that I needed to have the package taken to the hospital room, went away for a few seconds, then told me that it couldn't be done.  I told him that they'd done it many times before, and he told me that it was impossible.  I asked him to pass my call over to someone else, and he told me that he couldn't... that the only way for me to do that was to call back.

So I hung up, waited a few seconds, and called again.  Got the same guy.  Same routine.  Hung up.

Waited a couple of minutes, called again, and got the same guy.  I tried again to have him transfer me, and he told me that he couldn't.  So I hung up.

We usually work with West Way; they're based in our end of Ottawa and the drivers are generally good.  But at this point, it was time to try something else.  I called Capital Taxi.  And got the same guy.

Blue Line is the same company as Capital.

All of the major taxi companies in the city seem to be going through the same one call agent this evening.  Who insists that they can't do a thing that they've done many times before.

I was on my way to bed last night, somewhat too late after a pleasant party at Farthing Party.  In the bathroom, sitting in darkness with my eyes dark-adjusted... I saw spatters of something glowing on the wall beside me. I thought it might be a reflection of light from the hallway, under the hotel room door, but exploring it with my fingers and trying to block the light with my hands made it clear that that wasn't the case.  I turned on the light... and there was nothing to see.  Just the wallpaper.  I turned the light off again, and again I could see the glow.

Looking around the area, I found more glowing spatters on the wall in the little alcove that held the ironing board.

The glow didn't decrease visibly after several minutes.  The phosphorescent materials that I know about usually fade more quickly.

I turned the light on again.  I still couldn't see anything on the wallpaper.  Light off... still glowing.  Could it be under the wallpaper?  Some kind of hole in the wall, with a lit area on the other side?  Some kind of LED display, papered over?  There seemed to be too many tiny glows, distributed oddly, for something like that.

Light on.  Still nothing to see.

Something radioactive?  Some kind of Whovian crack in reality?  A Lovecraftian thing oozing through the wall?

I eventually decided that it probably wasn't anything like that.  But it took me a while to get to sleep.  When I woke up again in the wee hours, I went back to check, and the glowy stuff was still there -- much fainter than before.  I turned the light on for a few seconds, and the glow went back to being bright.  That was a big reliief -- it was following normal laws of physics.

Before I checked out of the room this morning, I borrowed a UV light from Jon Singer to shine on the walls.  As I expected, that made the stuff glow very brightly.

I haven't any idea what was going on.  When I checked out, I told the woman at the desk about the glowy stuff.  She suggested that it might be residue from a "glow stick", but I don't think that stuff phosphoresces..?  And I don't know if it would be completely invisible on the wallpaper.

If I start glowing, or turn into a mutant with amazing glow-stick powers, or disappear leaving behind only a cryptic written gurgling, the clue may lie in room 1119 of Hôtel Gouverneur Place Dupuis in Montreal.