Keep your pepperoni away from seagulls

Nick Burchill is from Halifax. He had been barred from the Empress Hotel in Victoria for 17 years.

His company sent him to a conference at the Empress in 2001. He was also in the Naval Reserve and when he told some Navy friends he was coming out west, they asked him to bring some Brother’s Pepperoni, a local delicacy in Nova Scotia.

He filled a suitcase with pepperoni, but the airline misplaced the bag. It was delivered to the Empress the following day.

It arrived just as he was going on a four hour sight-seeing tour. There was no refrigerator in his room, so he opened the window, spread the packages of pepperoni on the window ledge and the coffee table, reasoning it would be OK as it was a cool April day.

Oh, Oh, Nick, bad move. Huge. He returned, to find an entire flock of seagulls (about 40) in his room, gleefully chowing down on the East Coast treat.

In case you’re wondering, Brother’s TNT Pepperoni does nasty things to a seagull’s digestive system. When Nick entered the room the birds, which had pooped on everything, started flying around, crashing into things and tearing curtains as they desperately tried to leave through the small opening through which they had entered.

He finally managed to open the window further and drive them all away. Except for one, who tried coming back for more. It was a big one and it didn’t want to leave. So, Nick threw a shoe at the bird, but missed. The shoe went out the window.

“In a moment of clarity,” Nick says, “I grabbed a bath towel and jumped it. It started to freak, so I wrapped it in the towel and threw it out the window. I didn’t know that seagulls can’t fly when they’re wrapped in a towel.”

Duh! Sounds a bit like the WKRP in Cincinnati “Turkeys Can’t Fly” episode.

He had only a few minutes to get ready for an important company dinner, so he went to retrieve his shoe, which was covered in mud.

“The shoe was a mess,” he says. “I took it back to my room. I had closed the window and it was pretty ripe in there, but there was nothing I could do about it at that time. I washed the mud off my shoe but was now left with one dry shoe and one wet one.”

So, he was drying his shoe with the hairdryer when the phone rang. As Nick went to answer it, the power went off. It turns out that the hairdryer, which he had propped up to dry the shoe, fell into the sink full of water, and caused the outage (through most of the hotel). He finally called for help.

“I can still remember the look on the lady’s face when she walked into the room,” he says. “I didn’t know what to tell her, so I just said, ‘I’m sorry’ and I went to dinner. When I came back, I had been moved to a much smaller room”.

Shortly thereafter, his company received a letter banning him from the Empress. The ban was finally lifted earlier this year.

If I was him, I don’t think I’d have the nerve to go back.

Fred Trainor is a retired broadcaster. He lives in Okanagan Falls. Email: fredtrainor@shaw.ca.