A visit from hotel security in Las Vegas:

A number of years ago, I was in Las Vegas for COMDEX, the huge computer industry convention. My wife and I had checked into an affordable (very cheap) casino/hotel not too far from the Convention Center. We were freelance journalists for computer magazines, so it was an annual trip that gave us a chance to visit with other journalists and our editors. We weren't earning all that much, so we had to pinch pennies on those trips.

That particular year, my side business of selling mineral specimens to collectors had taken me to a mineral show in Southern California the day before we checked in to the hotel. I had my car filled with flats (18" x 24" x 4-6" boxes) of specimens I had purchased at the show, so after checking in, I got my heavy-duty luggage cart and moved them into the hotel room to keep them from getting stolen from the car. There were about 60 of those boxes. They took up quite a bit of space, actually. It took about 10 trips to move them all from the parking lot to the room, passing right through the casino area and past the check-in desk near the elevators.

The next morning, we did our mingling and other business at COMDEX, and then returned to the room before heading out to press events scattered around on the Strip. Free food, free drinks and more hobnobbing with our peers. However, before we could leave, there was a heavy knock on the door of our hotel room. "Hotel Security!" I heard when I asked who was there.

So, I opened the door, to find a couple of armed security guards who were very interested in what was in all of those boxes. I opened a couple of them and showed them and explained the innocuous contents, and they went on their way. They said that housekeeping service had reported those suspicious boxes and they needed to check them out.

No big deal, but there was, apparently, active security at that hotel. I had some unusual stuff in my room, so it got checked out. It makes me wonder about security at that Mandalay Bay hotel/casino. Was nobody curious? I might have been.