We argued about that until we got back to the car.
"Anyway, they wun't nobody come to his dog show if he don't take off his glasses and let 'em see who he is!" Grandma declared.
As we left the village she sighed and said, "So that's Palm Springs. It's a H. of a place, if you ask me. I swear'n, I like Banning a sight better."
There was one thing, though, that I liked about Palm Springs very much--and that was the effect the opening of the season there had on our business. People flocked toward the desert from Los Angeles, and those who couldn't afford to stay in Palm Springs stayed in towns that were close to Palm Springs. Besides this overflow from Palm Springs, we had the regular tourist trade, and October wasn't very old before our motel began to be full every night by nine.
It would have been full earlier if we had rented a cabin to everyone who applied for one. People have an annoying habit, though, of traveling in pairs or even singly, and now we always saved our nine double cabins until three or four people together appeared who wanted accommodations. Naturally, the rate for three or four is much higher than the rate for one or two. Until recently, on nights when couples wanted a cabin after our singles were full, we had been locking off the back bedroom of double cabins and renting the remainder of each as a single.
When our rollaway bed and the army cot were in use, we could accommodate a grand total of forty-seven people. And, since the parents of large families frequently put two children in each of the twin beds, and couples with one child often rented a single cabin and let the child sleep between them, there were many nights when our motel sheltered more than fifty persons besides ourselves.
There is often a lot of confusion among customers about the word "double" as applied to cabins and beds. A double cabin is, of course, a cabin with two rooms, each of which has a double bed. A single cabin is a single room with a double bed. For short, these are called "doubles" and "singles."
About half of the people who come into the office ask if we have a "double" available. Whenever anyone asks me that, I glance out at his car, which usually contains just one other person, and show him a single, without comment. People like this mean, of course, double bed. I've thought of explaining to all these people the difference between "single" and "double", but decided that a one-woman educational campaign of such magnitude would be too much for me.
Occasionally, though, the customer is more right than I give him credit for being. Sometimes two people request a double, and really mean it--they each want a bed and a separate room. In such cases, if I show them a single after they have asked for a double, they often make it a point to inquire if I have been in the motel business long.
The motel business must be one of the best cures known for shyness. Before we came to Banning the sight of a stranger used to make me ill at ease, and the idea of an introduction sometimes almost paralyzed me. All this culminated, of course, in my first bad attacks of customerphobia. After that I grew braver and braver until now, after meeting travelers from all parts of the country and even all parts of the world, I can actually be the one to begin a conversation with a stranger.