Tweet
This started out as merely a bitchfest concerning some new breakfast items that I, as night auditor, have to put out but then an entire month's allotment of suck came raining down over the course of this weekend, so here we are.
And here we go.
First, under the assumption that night auditors don't have enough to do, some shining mind at a higher pay grade than me decided to make the night auditors set out the breakfast. The breakfast attendant just maintains it. It took a long time to learn what all goes out -- and we feed these ungrateful little shits a lot of food -- and it took a while to get my rhythm down. When I did, though, I could get the entire thing knocked out in about 45 minutes, barring guests interrupting me.
Which they do, constantly. While I'm trying to run around and make breakfast for these people, guests are checking out, calling the front desk, demanding change for the vending machine, asking where the ice machine is, and I get the occasional straggler on busy weekends asking, at 5 AM, if we have any rooms available. Bottom line, I had enough to do as it was. Then someone decided, though, that even though waffles are by far the most popular item on our breakfast bar, people weren't eating enough waffles. And thus, we decided to pimp our waffles. Instead of little containers of syrup, now there are jugs of it, containers of sugar-free syrup, and serving dishes of grape jelly, mixed berries, shredded coconut, crushed Oreos, broken M&M's, and apple butter -- plus whipped cream, chocolate syrup, and raspberry syrup. I am rebuilding my routine to incorporate all of these things, but the bottom line remains that I have too much to do in setting out breakfast and not enough time to do it, and that especially rings true when (this really happened) I was interrupted while trying to cook bacon by someone calling from France.
Now that we have that out of the way, let's talk about this weekend.
Thursday
A woman checked in and immediately discovered that her sheets were filthy. Just filthy. She demanded new sheets. I sent the security guard up with them, and he reported back that she threw the old sheets at him, took the new sheets, and very carefully inspected them in front of him, lest they also be filthy. Just filthy.
I had hoped I had used up the week's allotment of suck with her, but it was not to be.
Friday
When I arrived at work, a cop car was parked under our porte-cochere. Why? Because someone had stolen a guest's truck from the parking lot. Thankfully, the fireworks were over by the time I got to work, but nevertheless we were off with a bang! About fifteen minutes later, a guest called down to report a domestic disturbance on his floor. The manager was still here and she went up to look, and reported back that it was indeed a couple, an old couple, screaming at each other over something one had done that the other found objectionable. I never found out what.
Next up, we had to go pick up a guest from the airport. The driver took along a bottle of water, which is something she always does to butter up the guests. When she offered it to the guest, the guest refused saying, quote: "No, I only drink organic water."
Let's all ponder that for a moment. Organic water.
Then the guest asked if she was anywhere near the mountains, which is funny because when you're here where I live, you're in a city that sits at the convergence of three mountain ranges and has terrain that ranges from 2200 feet above sea level, to well above 3000 feet above sea level in some of the rich mountainside neighborhoods that overlook downtown. I would think it rare to hop on a plane and not know where you're going, but perhaps I am wrong about that.
Lastly, a guest who bore a striking resemblance to Severus Snape from the Harry Potter Movies...
...walked in, checked in, and because he was a member of our loyalty program, asked for a bottle of water. When I asked him how many he wanted, he pinned me with a gaze and hissed, "Juuuuust ooooone." It would have been creepy if not for the fact that Snape memes were dancing in my head and I was having to fight hard not to laugh.
The rest of the night was quiet, which leads us to...
Saturday
The first thing that happened was that I was complicit in an affair. A man walked in and said he was just so tired he couldn't drive any further at all and wanted a room. His license said he was local, but he seemed harmless enough and so I decided to let him stay. He told me his wife would be along soon, and off he went.
His wife never arrived, but a young woman who gave off hooker vibes that could be picked up on radar did. She looked like most of the prostitutes around here do: like a malnourished meth addict who, when she gets really dolled up, looks like a 12-year-old wearing pancake makeup. A car dropped her off and she headed for the elevators, and about an hour later, the car arrived to pick her up again and away she went. In the meantime, I looked up the guest I had checked in shortly before this lovely young lady arrived, and discovered that he lives less than five miles away.
4.6 miles, to be exact. Now you tell me, is it at all fishy that someone who lives that close wants a room, and immediately afterward a woman broadcasting hooker in HD arrives?
Things settled down, and then a guest with what I would guess is OCD arrived from a late night of carousing, and stopped by the bowl of apples we keep on a table in the lobby and began pawing furtively through them. He kept casting worried glances my way as though he was certain I was going to vault the desk and come at him with a broom for the sin of apple-fondling. When he'd gone through the whole bowl, and come up with the two most perfect apples to be found in it, he clutched them to his chest and scurried away.
Finally, at 3:20 AM an insane woman called the front desk to complain that the beds were terribly uncomfortable. They sloped, she said, and if someone moved, the other person in bed could feel it. She asked if we had rooms with bigger beds, and was astonished to learn that we have rooms with two queen-size beds and rooms with one king-size bed. She was further astonished to learn that she had a room with two queen-size beds, and could not comprehend that there could be such a thing as a room with only one king-size bed.
Her suggested solution to the problem of dreadful beds? Allow her, after I had already offered her our "Please Steal From Us" guarantee and comping her first night, to take another room for free. This was reasonable to her, you see, because there were "two and a half" people in the room, and one of them was not willing to move to another room. The only solution was to give her two rooms for free. One for one person, and one for a person-and-a-half.
I refused. She told me that she and the other person-and-a-half would most definitely not be staying their second night with us and would go find another hotel.
Godspeed, lady. Shit not given. I told her that was fine and that if she wanted, she could take the issue up with management in the morning. Meanwhile, I got her "Please Steal From Us" guarantee paperwork ready, and it's waiting on the counter next to me as I type this.
That's it for now, but we have another hour, and a whole other shift to go.
Further bulletins as events warrant.
And here we go.
First, under the assumption that night auditors don't have enough to do, some shining mind at a higher pay grade than me decided to make the night auditors set out the breakfast. The breakfast attendant just maintains it. It took a long time to learn what all goes out -- and we feed these ungrateful little shits a lot of food -- and it took a while to get my rhythm down. When I did, though, I could get the entire thing knocked out in about 45 minutes, barring guests interrupting me.
Which they do, constantly. While I'm trying to run around and make breakfast for these people, guests are checking out, calling the front desk, demanding change for the vending machine, asking where the ice machine is, and I get the occasional straggler on busy weekends asking, at 5 AM, if we have any rooms available. Bottom line, I had enough to do as it was. Then someone decided, though, that even though waffles are by far the most popular item on our breakfast bar, people weren't eating enough waffles. And thus, we decided to pimp our waffles. Instead of little containers of syrup, now there are jugs of it, containers of sugar-free syrup, and serving dishes of grape jelly, mixed berries, shredded coconut, crushed Oreos, broken M&M's, and apple butter -- plus whipped cream, chocolate syrup, and raspberry syrup. I am rebuilding my routine to incorporate all of these things, but the bottom line remains that I have too much to do in setting out breakfast and not enough time to do it, and that especially rings true when (this really happened) I was interrupted while trying to cook bacon by someone calling from France.
Now that we have that out of the way, let's talk about this weekend.
Thursday
A woman checked in and immediately discovered that her sheets were filthy. Just filthy. She demanded new sheets. I sent the security guard up with them, and he reported back that she threw the old sheets at him, took the new sheets, and very carefully inspected them in front of him, lest they also be filthy. Just filthy.
I had hoped I had used up the week's allotment of suck with her, but it was not to be.
Friday
When I arrived at work, a cop car was parked under our porte-cochere. Why? Because someone had stolen a guest's truck from the parking lot. Thankfully, the fireworks were over by the time I got to work, but nevertheless we were off with a bang! About fifteen minutes later, a guest called down to report a domestic disturbance on his floor. The manager was still here and she went up to look, and reported back that it was indeed a couple, an old couple, screaming at each other over something one had done that the other found objectionable. I never found out what.
Next up, we had to go pick up a guest from the airport. The driver took along a bottle of water, which is something she always does to butter up the guests. When she offered it to the guest, the guest refused saying, quote: "No, I only drink organic water."
Let's all ponder that for a moment. Organic water.
Then the guest asked if she was anywhere near the mountains, which is funny because when you're here where I live, you're in a city that sits at the convergence of three mountain ranges and has terrain that ranges from 2200 feet above sea level, to well above 3000 feet above sea level in some of the rich mountainside neighborhoods that overlook downtown. I would think it rare to hop on a plane and not know where you're going, but perhaps I am wrong about that.
Lastly, a guest who bore a striking resemblance to Severus Snape from the Harry Potter Movies...
...walked in, checked in, and because he was a member of our loyalty program, asked for a bottle of water. When I asked him how many he wanted, he pinned me with a gaze and hissed, "Juuuuust ooooone." It would have been creepy if not for the fact that Snape memes were dancing in my head and I was having to fight hard not to laugh.
The rest of the night was quiet, which leads us to...
Saturday
The first thing that happened was that I was complicit in an affair. A man walked in and said he was just so tired he couldn't drive any further at all and wanted a room. His license said he was local, but he seemed harmless enough and so I decided to let him stay. He told me his wife would be along soon, and off he went.
His wife never arrived, but a young woman who gave off hooker vibes that could be picked up on radar did. She looked like most of the prostitutes around here do: like a malnourished meth addict who, when she gets really dolled up, looks like a 12-year-old wearing pancake makeup. A car dropped her off and she headed for the elevators, and about an hour later, the car arrived to pick her up again and away she went. In the meantime, I looked up the guest I had checked in shortly before this lovely young lady arrived, and discovered that he lives less than five miles away.
4.6 miles, to be exact. Now you tell me, is it at all fishy that someone who lives that close wants a room, and immediately afterward a woman broadcasting hooker in HD arrives?
Things settled down, and then a guest with what I would guess is OCD arrived from a late night of carousing, and stopped by the bowl of apples we keep on a table in the lobby and began pawing furtively through them. He kept casting worried glances my way as though he was certain I was going to vault the desk and come at him with a broom for the sin of apple-fondling. When he'd gone through the whole bowl, and come up with the two most perfect apples to be found in it, he clutched them to his chest and scurried away.
Finally, at 3:20 AM an insane woman called the front desk to complain that the beds were terribly uncomfortable. They sloped, she said, and if someone moved, the other person in bed could feel it. She asked if we had rooms with bigger beds, and was astonished to learn that we have rooms with two queen-size beds and rooms with one king-size bed. She was further astonished to learn that she had a room with two queen-size beds, and could not comprehend that there could be such a thing as a room with only one king-size bed.
Her suggested solution to the problem of dreadful beds? Allow her, after I had already offered her our "Please Steal From Us" guarantee and comping her first night, to take another room for free. This was reasonable to her, you see, because there were "two and a half" people in the room, and one of them was not willing to move to another room. The only solution was to give her two rooms for free. One for one person, and one for a person-and-a-half.
I refused. She told me that she and the other person-and-a-half would most definitely not be staying their second night with us and would go find another hotel.
Godspeed, lady. Shit not given. I told her that was fine and that if she wanted, she could take the issue up with management in the morning. Meanwhile, I got her "Please Steal From Us" guarantee paperwork ready, and it's waiting on the counter next to me as I type this.
That's it for now, but we have another hour, and a whole other shift to go.
Further bulletins as events warrant.
.
What the hell is wrong with people?!?!?!?!?! 
Also, she was confused by the two queens or one king rooms? That's like the foundation of hotel rooms in the US.
Comment