Some hillbilly lost his tailgate. Now that's the real story here.

Who steals a TV set in 2009?

The 70's called, they want your crime wave back...

Holliday Inn FTW! Best value around.

Seriously though, stealing from them is NOT cool. Go steal from the Ritz Carlton or somewhere that rips people off.

Why exactly, are they putting 37" big screen televisions in hotel rooms?

FTFA: A James Wood dealership emblem was affixed to the silver-birch colored gate.





/approves
//hot like a tailgate

I stole a hotel once but I got busted because it made a huge rise in my Levis.

studebaker hoch: it made a huge rise in my Levis.

I read that as you getting a boner, did I read that correct or am I way off?

I'm working the audit shift at a hotel right now, so I'm getting a kick...

It happens more often than you'd think. Here's the set-up. Guest checks into a room at a ridiculously low employee rate with a fake Friends & Family form. He/she doesn't have a CC on them, but offers to pay twice the room rate in cash to cover the incidental charge of $20 that gets put on every check-in. Front desk clerk thinks, "Wow! This guy is great! Everyone puts up a fight about the $20 incidental charge!" The guest checks-in, waits until 4 in the morning, unbolts the tv from the dresser, and carries it out through a side door, hoping that the night auditor won't notice. Since there's no CC on file, it's untraceable. The only chance you have to catch them is if they were dumb enough to put their real address/phone number on the reservation.

/I've caught 2 out of 3 that tried.
//The one that got away made off with 3 tvs.
///Still have a job, because no one else wants it.

farkin_Gary

Because they aren't selling the CRTs anymore. Also, hotel televisions have a whole series of options that you won't find on normal consumer TVs, such as interrupt control for emergency services, and 2 way communication for everything from room service to ordering pr0n.

gyoza1138: Because they aren't selling the CRTs anymore. Also, hotel televisions have a whole series of options that you won't find on normal consumer TVs, such as interrupt control for emergency services, and 2 way communication for everything from room service to ordering pr0n.

Don't forget the options you don't have on many of these TVs. Such as the Hotel TVs with the absence of RCA cable inputs, so you are unable to connect your own DVD/Blu Ray player to watch your pr0n.

Some hotel TV's are virtually worthless. not being able to access the menu or settings, plus a lot of them are old and will probably start showing a crappy picture soon. Not worth it.

TwistedIvory: In other crimes, Rebecca Johnson told Patrolman Brandon Carbaugh last week that the tailgate was stolen from her boyfriend's pickup in the 800 block of Gerlach Street. A James Wood dealership emblem was affixed to the silver-birch colored gate.

Who the hell DOES this?!

This seems to happen quite a bit, actually. Around me there was a mini wave of tailgate thefts. I guess that A) they are real easy to steal B) they weigh a fair amount at the scrap yard and C) enough people damage their own and need replacements.

Also working the audit at a Holiday Inn Express

TV's here aren't worth taking.

By the end of next year all Holiday Inns are supposed to have flat panels

TakeC: It happens more often than you'd think. Here's the set-up. Guest checks into a room at a ridiculously low employee rate with a fake Friends & Family form. He/she doesn't have a CC on them, but offers to pay twice the room rate in cash to cover the incidental charge of $20 that gets put on every check-in. Front desk clerk thinks, "Wow! This guy is great! Everyone puts up a fight about the $20 incidental charge!" The guest checks-in, waits until 4 in the morning, unbolts the tv from the dresser, and carries it out through a side door, hoping that the night auditor won't notice. Since there's no CC on file, it's untraceable. The only chance you have to catch them is if they were dumb enough to put their real address/phone number on the reservation.

I see.

*makes notes*

But how did they get the remote off the nightstand?

jboomgaarden: But how did they get the remote off the nightstand?

Dude, what good is a remote without a nightstand to hold it?

I'm at a Residence Inn that was built last year. Every room has at least one 37" LG flat screen. Every newly built Marriott hotel will have flat screens in the room from now on. And they're not the standard tvs of yesteryear. Since a lot of the business traveler hotels are not offering pay-per-view in the rooms anymore, the tvs that are installed now have all the hook-ups you could ever need (HDMI, Component, RCA, VGA), which are fully accessible.

We have a Redbox in the lobby and tiny DVD players that guests can borrow for the night. I'm so glad that management decided to do away with the in-room pay-per-view system which was broken a lot more often than it worked. Not to mention it was a billing nightmare.

TakeC: I'm at a Residence Inn that was built last year. Every room has at least one 37" LG flat screen. Every newly built Marriott hotel will have flat screens in the room from now on. And they're not the standard tvs of yesteryear. Since a lot of the business traveler hotels are not offering pay-per-view in the rooms anymore, the tvs that are installed now have all the hook-ups you could ever need (HDMI, Component, RCA, VGA), which are fully accessible.

We have a Redbox in the lobby and tiny DVD players that guests can borrow for the night. I'm so glad that management decided to do away with the in-room pay-per-view system which was broken a lot more often than it worked. Not to mention it was a billing nightmare.

I'm guessing you are a bit of an expert on porn.

a2pfunk:
I'm guessing you are a bit of an expert on porn.

Nope, no pr0n. When we had pay-per-view, we only offered movies that had been out for about a year and charged $12.95 for them.

It still amazes me how many people bought them too. Especially when Blockbuster is across the street.

ElLoco:

I see.

*makes notes*

Trust me, it's really not worth it. The most you could probably get out of the tv would be $250 minus the $100 you paid to get into the room. And more than likely, you will get caught. The security cameras in most hotels are set up to make a tone whenever someone goes in and out of a door. I got into the habit pretty quickly of taking a glance at the monitor whenever I heard that tone.

And besides, most night auditors love being bad guys anyways. There's a reason we work nights...we don't really like people all that much. Personally, my special touch when I kick someone out for noise/damage/smoking weed is to charge not only their own room to their CC, but also the bills of all their neighbors' that they disturbed in the night as well. It makes damage control in the morning so much easier.

Working audit at a Hampton Inn right now..

I'm not aware of any theft problems here. Aside from that one car break-in spree last fall that hit about 8 hotels in one night. We're in a remodel right now, I'll have to peek in the new rooms to see if the TV's are now flat panel or not.

No Pay-per-view here.

Wasn't smart enough to steal gas money for His truck. Only in the Natti.

I thought hotels/motels had some sort of alarm system that goes off if you try to unbolt the TV or disconnect the cables. I stayed in one hotel that had a small plaque on the TV that said the front desk would be alerted if the TV was tampered with.

Working audit on the Eastern Shore. Still remodeling.

Though a few years ago before my time during remodeling. A man and wife paid cash, when no ID was needed. They had a u-haul and made away with everything in the room. Housekeeping at first thought the room was taken down for remodeling without them knowing, took a little while and some heated talks between departments, to figure out exactly what happened. By everything, I mean everything. Faucets, shower head, sink, mirror, they even took the carpet.

My Samsung 58in Plasma can be put into "Hotel mode" in the service menu. (Probably all of the Samsungs have the same service menu). The site I got the service menu info from though, warned to be careful since once you put it in hotel mode you can't get it out without sending it back to Samsung... Other brands may be the same.

TV's are pretty useless in hotel mode... you can't plug anything into the inputs. Those nice HDMI inputs? Useless, no HDTV for the thieves!

As for hotels buying these TV's? A 37in TV is pretty cheap now. You can buy a 37in TV for what it used to cost them on the 27in CRT's. If they're replacing the TV's anyways, why not replace them with something they can say "LOOK AT THIS!"

Jamieboy: I thought hotels/motels had some sort of alarm system that goes off if you try to unbolt the TV or disconnect the cables. I stayed in one hotel that had a small plaque on the TV that said the front desk would be alerted if the TV was tampered with.


And ever "your on camera" sign is 100% true.

I stayed a hotel in St jean quebec when i was doing my basic training. Just happens to be a Holiday Inn Express, the tv's were 32' HD LCD or something like that, nice tv's. We took and xbox there on the weekends for something to do.

In any case, the place was a maze, with an exit at almost every end, no cameras and TV wasnt even bolted to anything. They didnt require a CC and all they did was look at your ID when you got there. Anyone with a fake could have gotten a really nice TV for 200$

"Why exactly, are they putting 37" big screen televisions in hotel rooms?"

Because people on vacation expect more (or at least the same) from a hotel room than they do at home. They are on vacation and want to feel special. After 9/11, everyone stopped traveling and started updating their homes. The first upgrade was the flat-panel TV. When people started travelling again, they were now staying in hotel rooms with lesser-quality TVS, bed linens, etc. What fun is that? The hotels responded. In a lot of moderate hotels today, you'll see flat panel TVs, better mattresses, and nicer bed linens. Not to mention, with the digital signal transition, fewer vendors were installing digital receivers into CRTs.

Also, as a previous farker mentioned, many hotels use commercial tvs, not the consumer models you see at Best Buy or Sears. They have special functions for receiving and descrambling PPV content and two-way communication, as well as limited menu access so the morons that think they know shiat about TVs don't fark up the system. They have cloning abilities, so the hotel can set up one tv, save the settings, and then clone that setup on all of their other TVs. Trust me, the next time you're sleeping in your hotel room, you'll be happy that your neighbor can't blast the volume at full level as he's watching porn.

There are security devices for alerting when a TV is being removed, but not a lot of places install them. A property would have to lose more than 1 or 2 TVs before the cost of fitting all of their rooms with security devices would be a cost-effective option.

In some of the industry's aspects, a hotel's rating for stars or AAA diamonds are based on whether they have a certain level of amenities in the guest rooms now, and flat panel TV's are one of those things.

Having been in the hospitality industry for 15 years now I've seen a lot of stupidity. At one hotel we had a housekeeper who got mad about her hours being cut, so she planned to have her ex-con boyfriend come over and swap out their crappy 19" TV in a room she was cleaning for our nicer 32" TV. Of course she was dumb enough to plan it in earshot of another housekeeper who told us as it was about to go down. We had the cops on the phone as boyfriend pulled into the parking lot, and we had the maintenance man hiding in the bushes to witness the whole thing and give us a play by play from his cell phone. The boyfriend didn't even get out of the hotel driveway before the cops were on him. We got to see both their asses get hauled away in police cruisers. And after she was finally released from prison she was dumb enough to list us as a reference when she applied at another hotel.

At a different location, a housekeeper not only was dumb enough to steal 3 TV's out of storage during renovation, but she was such a stupid crackhead she sold each TV for $75 cash to buy crack. The TV's were 42" LCD HD flat panels, and she sold them for $75 each. Of course we were able to track them down because it's a small town and everybody knows who everybody is, especially the crackheads It took 2 months to gather enough evidence to get an arrest, then finally she was hauled off one day as soon as she walked out to the parking lot. And the 3 crackheads she sold the TV's too were also busted and charged.

I bought some old furniture and a TV really cheap from my hotel after we started renovations - they were going to sell off the old stuff eventually so I got first dibs. I came by on a Sunday to pick up the stuff and tons of people saw us hauling this stuff out the back door of the hotel to our pick-up. We were dressed in jeans, so didn't look like employees, and I figured the desk staff would have people reporting us in suspicion of stealing night stands, lamps and a TV. Not a single person said a word to the staff, and nobody approached us to question what we were doing. I guess that's the current state of human nature now though - don't know, don't care.

I used to do tech support for Philips/Magnavox (and thank god not anymore, that job sucked rocks). Hotel TVs are all but useless without the Super Special Master Remote... which Joe Average can't buy. So in essence you steal one and all you've got is a very expensive paperweight.

a2pfunk: TwistedIvory: In other crimes, Rebecca Johnson told Patrolman Brandon Carbaugh last week that the tailgate was stolen from her boyfriend's pickup in the 800 block of Gerlach Street. A James Wood dealership emblem was affixed to the silver-birch colored gate.

Who the hell DOES this?!

This seems to happen quite a bit, actually. Around me there was a mini wave of tailgate thefts. I guess that A) they are real easy to steal B) they weigh a fair amount at the scrap yard and C) enough people damage their own and need replacements.

"Damn, dude. That's a tough break, losing your tailgate like that. Listen, I got a buddy a couple of blocks over. I think he's got one that's the same color and everything. $50 sound okay?"