Jaunted

The video shows valets from a Hyatt Hotel in downtown St. Louis doing donuts and spinning out in guests cars in the hotel's parking garage. Hotel representatives confirmed that the videos were made on their property about six months ago, but added that the valet parking firm pictured had already been replaced for unrelated reasons by the time the video came to light.

Hotel guests were aghast, of course, but I'm surprised it's taken this long for a video like this to surface. When I was a valet, we used to fight over who got to park the odd Porsche or Ferrari that rolled under the hotel awning, and it was standard procedure to gun the engine and see just how fast you could drive to the top level of the parking garage.

Sometimes, when the hotel was crowded and we were forced to use the extra parking garage a few hundred yards down the street, we'd keep one sports car parked out front until a comparable one checked in. Then, two lucky valets would take the cars, line up next to each other at the stoplight, and have a half-mile long drag race down Waterside Drive to the garage. Not me, of course. The other guys. The bad kids. Never me.

Yes, there were some close calls, nearly spinning out into the garage wall or fishtailing in a puddle, but we mostly got away clean. Except for that one time. A dude came in with a Monte Carlo SS or some such wide-tired American beast, and naturally a valet tested its acceleration a few times in the garage. Turns out the guy had a couple of really heavy drums of oil or something in his trunk, and he found them completely knocked over when he loaded his luggage after checking out. Only extreme acceleration could knock such heavy cans over, but that's what we did and we were stone cold busted. If I recall, a few guys got chewed out by the boss, but nobody was fired.

So just accept the fact that if you use valet parking, there's a good chance your car will get abused. It'll probably be fine and you'll never know the difference, but if the thought of some 19-year-old cowboy pushing the pedal to the metal in your Beemer is too much, you'd best park it yourself, because you can't go against human nature.

[Photo: hozd.com]

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