Nick Burchill was 17 years old when he was banned from the Fairmont Empress hotel in Victoria, British Columbia.

In a now-viral Facebook post about the incident that led to his banning, Burchill says that, upon telling his west coast friends that he’d be visiting, he was asked to bring along some of Halifax’s famous Brother’s Pepperoni, “a local delicacy.” Burchill filled a whole suitcase with the stuff, but it was misplaced by the airline on his trip across the country.

The suitcase was promptly returned to Burchill at the Fairmont Empress one day later, but he was concerned that, by the time he could give it to his friends, it would’ve been left at room temperature for too long. “Just to be safe, I decided to keep it cool,” Burchill writes. “My room was a nice, big, front-facing room on the fourth floor. It was well appointed, but it did not have a refrigerator. It was April, the air was chilly. An easy way to keep all of this food cool would be just to keep it next to an open window. I lifted one of the sashes and spread the packages of pepperoni out on the table and window sill. Then, I went for a walk… for about four or five hours.”

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When Burchill returned to his room half a day later, he found roughly 40 seagulls in his room, consuming any pepperoni they could get their hands. The room was covered in a gross combination of seagull drool and feces. But that’s not all.

When Burchill entered the room, he startled the seagulls, and, “The result was a tornado of seagull excrement, feathers, pepperoni chunks and fairly large birds whipping around the room. The lamps were falling. The curtains were trashed. The coffee tray was just disgusting,” he writes. In the excitement, Burchill threw his shoe at one of the seagulls and it flew out the window. But it doesn’t end there, either!

“I was down to one gull left in the room, but it was a big one [that] didn’t want to leave,” Burchill says. “In a moment of clarity, I grabbed a towel and jumped it. It stated to freak out, so I wrapped it in the towel and threw it out of the window. I had forgotten that seagulls cannot fly when they are wrapped in a towel.”

The towel flew out the window as some tourists were walking on the ground below, and they were hit with a towel-covered gull soon after they were hit with his shoe.

Once the commotion subsided, Burchill went to recover his shoe and found it in a muddy puddle, but he needed to wear it to a work event he was expected at shortly. “I choose to dry the wet shoe using the little hairdryer. It was actually doing quite well. I had the hairdryer jammed in there and the shoe was drying quite nicely. Then, the phone rang,” Burchill says. “I walked into the next room to answer it and the power goes off. It turns out that the hairdryer had vibrated free of the shoe and fallen into the sink full of water… I don’t know how much of the hotel’s power I knocked out, but at that point I decided I needed help.”

Burchill called the front desk to ask for help cleaning up the mess, and when he returned from dinner, he found that he’d been moved to a much smaller room. The company he worked for later received a letter permanently banning him from the Empress.

Burchill shared the post to Facebook as part of a formal apology to the Empress hotel, and he updated it on March 31 to include that the hotel accepted his apology.

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