"We were delighted to serve you during your recent stay at Microtel Inns & Suites Kansas City," begins the e-mail I got last night.

Oh shit, I'm thinking. How delighted could they have been?

I was covering the post-game party with several dozen noisy female football players in rooms and hallways until three in the morning.

So enthusiastic was my coverage that the night ended when I burst forth from the lobby elevator, roared up to the registration desk, screamed in a language of my spontaneous invention that I needed a 7:00 a.m. wake-up call, and snatched a half-dozen candy bars out of a wicker basket on the clerk's desk.

"Feedback from our valued guests is important to us."

Okay, Microtel, here's some feedback. When people are partying in your hotel at 3:00 in the morning, and they inevitably storm into your lobby and raid the clerk's wicker basket, it is candy bars that they seek.

They do not, take my word for it, appreciate discovering upon their hard-fought arrival to their room, that their six candy bars are, instead, packages of chewing gum.

Got that, Microtel?

Thanks for listening.