(///desk.finds.canny – Malmaison Hotel, Leeds, UK)
Nobody could work out the identify of #thebreakfastthief.
It had been going on for a couple of years now. At first, an obscure Instagram internet account with photos of extravagant breakfasts began to pick up a modest following of people enamoured of eggs and avocados.
Then the narrative behind the pictures began to emerge. The mysterious breakfast thief started to boast that none of those delicious breakfasts had actually been paid for, and that the imagery actually showed the fruits of their larceny.
The Breakfast Thief insisted that this pursuit of free breakfasts was not just about eating without paying. It was also about exploiting the system, showing hotels the flaws in their breakfast routines, protecting breakfast for people who had paid for it.
The process was relatively simple. The breakfast thief tended to work shortly after service opened – they were adept at staring at the list of room numbers at the desk at the front of the breakfast area, and then supplying a number that they could see had not yet been ticked off. Nobody ever checked for a name or a room key, they simply asked whether they had eaten breakfast there before.
And so the breakfast thief was able to drink copious juices, tea and coffee, indulge in fruit, pastries and hot treats from the buffet, or order breakfast classics from the menu. And nobody ever knew that they weren’t supposed to be there.
Of course there were scares. There were times that the person whose room number they had stolen came down and stood looking a little bewildered, explaining that they would remember if they had already eaten breakfast and could they please just sit down. The staff would inevitably just relent, assuming a mistake had been made with a different guest, but occasionally they would scan the room, seeing if they remembered who had quoted that room number, even though that information had been forgotten almost as soon as it had been imparted. And of course there was the morning in Bristol when the thief was almost rumbled and had to crawl under the tables to get away, knocking over three chairs and a samovar during their escape.
As The Breakfast Thief’s fame grew, so the stakes got higher, with hotel chains offering ‘a free breakfast to whoever finds the thief’, seemingly without recognising the irony. The thief grew more canny about their breakfast choices, ever earlier starts, scoffing rather than savouring. The energy seemed to go out of the postings – as follower numbers boomed so the new material became more infrequent, the risk of being caught beginning to eliminate the thrill of the free French Toast.
And then the posts stopped. At first, nobody realised. After all, a couple of weeks without a breakfast thief post was nothing, garnered no comment. But three weeks, four weeks, a couple of months – suddenly it began to dawn on the hordes of followers that #thebreakfastthief was no more, that the hunt for free breakfast had simply stopped with no announcement, no fanfare.
Fans felt short-changed – they would never know who the breakfast thief had been, what they had done before and what they were doing now. And then people moved onto other things, and hotel breakfast staff could relax once more.
A few weeks later, an Instragram account called #thedinnerthief went live.
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what3stories 