Registration Form Hospitality Rooms: Fill & Download for Free

I am not in hotel business.Yes, tablets can be beneficial for hotels.Some of the uses:Guest check-ins, checkoutsBaggage check-insHospitality room responses (helpdesk)Food menus/ordering/feedbackPayment processingStaff registration, attendance etcStaff training/coaching videosInventory managementNote: Tablet will not do all of these without an App.

People in Canada take out private health insurance to cover costs that are not covered by their provincial health plan. These may include the cost of prescription medications, prescription eyeglasses, dental coverage, private hospital rooms, health coverage while traveling abroad, or the cost of extended rehabilitation or forms of alternative treatment that fall outside the scope of provincial coverage.Whether or not it is wise to pay for such insurance is debatable. Many of the things such supplementary insurance plans cover are routine expenses (e.g., dental), which means that you’ll be paying for them no matter what; when you pay through an insurer, your payment schedule may be more predictable but you are paying more, since your payments also include the insurer’s profits, and you may also be subjected to the indignity of an insurance company bureaucrat second-guessing the necessity of a medically recommended procedure (being self-employed, I canceled my supplemental health insurance many years ago when I needed to seek the insurer’s preapproval for a bleeping root canal.) The one exception is travel outside Canada, especially to the US; sudden illness or an accident can result in astronomical medical expenses, which are not covered by the provincial health plan.This is what insurance is for, after all; not to cover recurring, routine expenses but to protect you from financial disaster. And the provincial health care plan does just that within Canada. On the few occasions my wife and I needed non-trivial medical services, we received top notch, world class service from dedicated and caring professionals, and we were only aware of the fact that someone, somewhere, is paying for the care that we receive because we were asked to present our OHIP (Ontario Health Insurance Plan) cards upon registration at the medical facility.

There are all sorts of “Mensa gatherings.” Most every Friday, I have breakfast or lunch with a group of Mensans. Our chapter also meets for a monthly dinner at one of six or eight restaurants that are on a rotation. However, the annual meeting of Mensans in the United States is called the Annual Gathering, or AG. It’s in a different city each year. I’ve been to two—Birmingham, AL, around 2007 or 2008, and in Portland, OR, about six years ago.These meetings are typically attended by 1000 people or so, so we take over a large hotel, and maybe a satellite hotel or two. There are usually lecture or other activity sessions of every topic you can imagine, some led by Mensans, some not. One led by a non-Mensan was from a history professor from The University of Alabama (Roll Tide!) who had written a book about a U.S. Navy warship that was sunk in World War II and not documented the way the Navy normally handles these incidents. Another session was led by a Mensan woman who had a business selling sex toys. She brought quite a few to pass around. Several were made of stainless steel and it occurred to me you could make a pretty good bludgeon out of several. There are often multiple sessions ongoing at any one time, so you have to choose which you want to go to. Some are sparsely attended, and others have people spilling out the door.I attended one—I think it was about cheese—where the speaker invited the audience to interrupt him with questions. The response was immediate and and vocal: “NOOOOOOO!” Veteran attendees knew that this would derail the presentation, and that the speaker wouldn’t get through more than a minute or two of his prepared remarks. Such is the nature of Mensans.There are other elements common to all of the AGs I’m aware of. These include:A hospitality room. Rather than a hotel room or suite like I’ve seen at other conferences, this is usually set up in a large meeting room or ballroom. In Portland, it was on a floor of the hotel’s parking garage, with industrial carpet and tables brought in. The hospitality room is open 24/7, and there are people there at all times of the day and night. There are soda vending machines set to dispense sodas without putting in any money. There are long tables stocked with every snack food you can think of—imagine going to the snack aisles at Costco or Sam’s Club and buying six cases of everything. At scheduled times, there is often hot food put out, so that you could go the whole AG and never pay for a meal. The food in Birmingham was plentiful and tasty; the food in Portland was sparse and sometimes inedible.There are tables where anyone can sit down and start a conversation with anyone who happens to be there. Most of the people I met were congenial and interesting. As with any large group, some are jerks. After telling one attendee that I was a retired police officer, this pretentious asshole perked up and asked, “Hey, did you get to kill anybody?” That conversation ended quickly.A gaming room, often adjacent to or incorporated with the hospitality room. Some Mensans are rabid gamers, and I’m talking about board games, not computer or video games. Now and then, you’ll see a game endorsed by Mensa. This is where those games are tried out and evaluated. The games go on 24/7, and by the looks of some of the participants, you might think they spent the entire three or four days there.A “Young Mensans” program for adolescent Mensa members. I didn’t participate (being out of the demographic by about 50 years), but they looked like they were engaged and having a good time.A “Mister Mensa” competition. I think this is something like a beauty pageant that isn’t taken too seriously, but I didn’t stop in, so I’m not really sure.A volunteer security force of Mensans. I got drafted into this one in Birmingham. The security people wear some kind of white hat (we had these giveaway Stetsons that were too small for me, so I mostly went incognito) and are around mainly as go-to people or liaisons to hotel security or the local police. I was briefed on things to look out for:“Campers.” Some Mensans try to attend and not book a hotel room, sleeping on lounge sofas and stashing a duffle bag or backpack on the premises. Since 9/11, hotel security people are more wary of unattended bags or packages, so this is more of a problem than in previous years. Some of the campers have been known to get confrontational with hotel staff.Nudists. I didn’t see any of these at either AG I attended, but I was told that, in past years, some Mensans decided that clothing could be considered optional at AG activities. Apparently, the threat of instigation of procedures that will result in the nudist becoming a registered sex offender is a deterrent.Huggers. When you get your AG nametag (a neck-worn ID tag like you get at most conferences these days), you have the opportunity to adorn it with colored dots that are available at the registration desk. There is a key to what all of them mean, but there were so many that I quickly lost track. The three germane to this topic were green, yellow, or red dots. A green dot meant it was okay to hug the wearer; a yellow meant that it might be okay, but ask first; red meant “don’t touch me.” There were, in previous years, some aggressive male “huggers” who targeted women, never asked if it was okay to hug them, and extended the hug to a near-massage. I didn’t encounter any of these, either.Freeloaders. If you were in one of the sessions, you were supposed to be registered at the AG and wearing a nametag. This was mainly to keep people from wandering in off the street and protect the event for the people who had paid for it.There is also a general meeting of Mensans and a meeting of the American Mensa Board of Directors. Some Mensans are heavily invested in the mechanics of American Mensa, and come to the AG mainly for the Mensa political goings-on. These meetings can get extremely contentious, although I didn’t hear of any violence.An awards banquet, where people get recognized for volunteer service, recruiting, being an exceptional test proctor, publications awards, and so on. Not being considered for any of these awards, I didn’t go, and do not feel diminished as a person for this omission.Reading back on this, I might give the impression that the AG is a creepfest of weirdos, and this is not the case. I didn’t find everyone I met to be irresistibly charming, but most were reasonably congenial and well-behaved. A Mensa online forum mentioned that someone was actually arrested and removed from the premises at the most recent AG in Indianapolis, but this is such an unusual happening that the Mensa Executive Committee felt that it needed to be explained to avoid the rumor mill. It’s probably more accurate to describe the crowd as “eccentric.”The AG was an okay event. I went to my first one because I had lots of frequent flier miles to burn and wanted the diversion, but it wasn’t something that I felt compelled to do again. A few years later, I was dating another Mensan who had never been to an AG, and that year’s event was within driving distance. She asked me to take her as her birthday present that year. Maybe I’ll go to another one someday.This happens to be my 6,000th answer on Quora. Thanks, Frank James Wilson , for the A2A.