Week two: a confession

Nobody warns you about week two.

Week one you’re basically on holiday with a laptop. Room service feels like a personality trait. You tell everyone back home “it’s actually really nice here” and mean it.

Then week two happens.

The minibar becomes a moral crisis

You do not need a €9 bag of almonds. You buy it anyway, at 11pm, standing in front of the minibar like it personally wronged you. This happens four more times before checkout, and you never once feel good about it.

You develop feelings about the gym

Every hotel gym has the same three machines and one that’s broken, always the one you actually wanted. By day ten you’ve made peace with the elliptical. By day fourteen you’ve named it.

Room service knows too much

“Same as yesterday” becomes a full sentence. The waiter knows your order, your table, roughly what time you’ll show up looking like you didn’t sleep. Not friendship exactly. Close enough that it’s starting to feel weird.

You forget what your own coffee tastes like

Not bad coffee, just the same cup, the same little UHT milk pot, morning after morning, until you genuinely can’t remember what coffee tastes like when you make it yourself.

Somewhere around day fifteen, you stop unpacking

Not because you’re leaving. Some part of you has just quietly accepted that living out of a suitcase, no kitchen, no real desk, a bed that’s slightly too firm, is the life now.

It doesn’t have to be

Corporate housing isn’t an upgrade from this. It’s the actual fix. A kitchen and the minibar loses its power over you. A desk and your back stops filing complaints. A door that isn’t in a hallway of identical doors and you might actually remember which city you woke up in.

If week two of your last work trip sounds familiar, you’re probably overdue for an apartment instead of a room.

Ask us how we know.