Due to company policy, I think I have stayed in every 5 star hotel in Edinburgh. I remember checking in once, at the same time the Eurythmics were checking out, just in front of Dave Stewart in the line

I hated 5 start hotels. Why?

Well company policy was that they would pay whatever for the hotel room, but food was fixed at a ludicrous low allowance. So I would pass the restaurants knowing that I could in no way afford them, and instead have to find a burger joint instead. That was fine, but the other thing 5 star joints expect is that you will use room service for everything. So no tea or coffee making facilities, and since room service was extra, again i could not use it.

Eventually I worked out that hotels are hotels, you get a bed, a shower and a TV, and you really don't need anything else, so you are better off going for a 2 or 3 star hotel, since they don't expect you to have a platinum American express

(My boss, would often have to go to Stockholm. Sometimes they would put him up in the best hotel, the same one Nobel prize winners would get. My boss had a predilection for lounging around in old cycle lycra gear. This used to confuse the staff, who could not work out whether he was allowed to be there, or whether he was an eccentric billionaire)

5* hotels in Edinburgh! Do you work for Oracle on the Edinburgh Uni project! hahahahaha

What a ludicrous company policy and waste of money!

and pain in the ass for the reasons hammarbtyp noted.

Its because of thinking like that that "business class" exists to pump out more co2 per person and charge businesses 10x the normal seat price.

> Five-star hotels in Edinburgh

You are the notorious Fred Goodwin , and I claim his former knighthood...

Not quite that level of luxury, but back in the 1990s we had a small customer in Australia who was having problems with some comms software. Very occasionally, every few weeks, it would lose a message. Since these came from burglar alarm systems he was understandably not happy about even an occasional dropped alert.

We spent months trying to diagnose it remotely, with no success. A bug? config issue? poor local support team? we had no idea. Eventually, though, the customer snapped and our director came in one Monday morning to a very Australian message: "If I don't see an engineer here by the end of the week, your kit is going in the river". It was decided that bad publicity outweighed the tiny financial loss of losing that small customer, which is why I ended up at the Australian embassy on the Wednesday, queuing for a visa.

Now, the interesting thing about buying a ticket to Australia at zero notice is that they are not cheap, and economy class almost non-existent. Which is how I ended up with a business-class round-the-world ticket, on BA. Fully flexible, any number of stops, had to return to London with 12 months :-)

Not much I could do on the outbound leg, after an all-too-brief 2 hour stopover in Bangkok I was collected by the local sales guy at the airport, got a quick shower at my hotel, and was presented booted & suited (and mostly awake) to the customer at 10am Friday. He was so delighted that someone had been sent that he told me to take the weekend to recover and be back 9am Monday, so I had a weekend sightseeing in Melbourne to get over jetlag. Got my first "mid-year Christmas", a very weird experience!

A week later I'd found the problem (it was a bug), fixed it, and embarked on my return journey via other parts of Australia, NZ, the USA, etc. Managed to visit a few company offices on the way, to justify the occasional night on expenses, but I didn't have much vacation time left by the end. One of my best business trips...

In fact, the only unhappy person was my boss. The bug? It was in some buffer-handling code, if two messages came in simultaneously (within a few uS) the second was queued in a circular buffer, and one index pointer which should have been an "i" was a "1" (they looked the same on the dot-matrix printers we used in those days). Never a problem unless those 2 messages hit at the same time and a second buffer slot was briefly required. Instead the 2nd message overwrote the 1st. It was in code I'd written... Fortunately my boss was the forgiving type.

When I worked for a local authority, there was no chance of luxury overnight accommodation due to it all being funded by the taxpayer.

To their credit though, they didn't always book the absolute cheapest. Except for once, In Reading. I saw my hotel on the news a month or so later - It turned out there had been a murder there not long before my stay.

> I saw my hotel on the news a month or so later - It turned out there had been a murder there not long before my stay.

I once stayed in Taiwan, and someone was shot in my hotel, whilst I was staying there. Fortunately I was out at the time.

On my ex-employer's travel system log in page there was a single hotel in Coventry listed on the login page as being "unsuitable" for company employees and not to book it. We never found out what was so bad about it...

"I had no idea where it was she was going but I was completely dazzled by the most incredibly beautiful person I'd ever met," Terry told On Call.

I hate Terry.

Needed to go interstate to resolve a major issue at a branch office and it just so happened that the marketing director's best friend from business school ran the most luxurious hotel in the area - so I got to stay in said hotel's most luxurious suite.

Sadly, with the amount of work involved and the tight schedule, I barely had time for much more than sleep in the suite - though I did manage to set aside an hour to spend in the six-person jacuzzi (where was Halle Berry then?!).

I once stood at the check in at Manchester airport behind Gail from Coronation Street (Helen Worth) when on a business trip. I then went to the ersatz "Rovers Return" bar they have there for a pint before my flight, but sadly she didn't put in an appearance.

In the late 90's I was doing work for a satellite communications company (no long defunct) that was building a new SATCOM system with handheld terminals. Common enough these days, but at the time it would have been state of the art. The prime contractor for the ground segment was a certain well-known Japanese company, which meant I had to go over to Japan for meetings a few times of year. Because the company I was working for tended to really splash the cash, we normally stayed in a top 5-star hotel in Yokohama. However one trip the hotel was not available - unfortunately the Japanese Imperial Royal Family was staying and had booked up the entire place!

On another trip, we returned to Tokyo airport in plenty of time for our return flight, only to find that the flight was cancelled due to the aircraft having broken one of its engines (a new engine was being flown out, but not until the next day). We where offered seats on the next flight, but that was 4 hours away. The manager in charge of the trip basically said "that is not acceptable" and stormed off; 30 minutes late he was back with a beam smile and clutching tickets for an alternative flight with another airline that left only a few minutes after our original flight, Unfortunately, business class was full, so we where forced to fly First Class.

Before I read the article ..

I've read the title. The only association I have with Halle Berry and I.T. is the hacker job interview she gave in the movie "Swordfish" . I can only assume that is not why the correspondent "told her where to go"

Reminds me of the time my employer at the time switched from an ERP written by a local company with local tech support to, mmm... Oracle.

Naturally the whole thing went tits up immediately, and seeing as the business couldn't stop work as we supplied several large supermarkets, we had to fix the problems whilst the warehouse was still operating.

During the fortnight it took to get everything working I was put up in the best hotel in town, with a wonderful 4-room suite which I used for less than 4 hours a night.

I told my boss the Travelodge was closer and cheaper, but he told me he wouldn't have any of his staff staying there...

You sorted out an Oracle problem in a fortnight, even if it did take 20 hour days? Birmingham council and Edinburgh University want to speak to you right now.

I had to google (duck-gg) Halle Berry - I must get out more - but have to agree with our pseudonymous Terry (who once wrote a book about a so-hot-right-then programming language.)

Must have been around 2000-4, I am guessing, and putting my poker chips on C# which might put Andrew Troelsen in the frame. :)

Not sure whether this is high tech Where's Wally or Goonish Casting Crustaceans .