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This was when I worked at the front desk of a hotel. Now, this CW, we'll call her Janelle, was not very bright. She had a habit of going to the bathroom every hour on the hour for ten minutes carrying her purse, and not just once a month like one might expect, but all the time. So we figured she was using something. She also would come in to work extremely hung over on a regular basis, and would often fall asleep at her desk. Boss Man wouldn't fire her because she had a really short contract, and even though Awesome CW and I were following her trail of badly entered dining room tickets and completely wrong reservation letters on a daily basis, fixing her mistakes, he felt she couldn't possibly mess anything up that bad in a month and a half, right? Wrong.
One day I get this panicked phonecall from a guest who's coming in about a month. She says she got two letters in the mail from us confirming her reservation, and two receipts, each showing that we'd charged her $2XXX. We had package deals available on which the customer had to pay the full amount rather than a deposit, and she'd gotten one of those. She was understandably upset to be charged $4XXX rather than $2XXX. I told her I'd look in the system and get in contact with our accountant, who was in another state (she was the mother of Boss Man's kids and they had to leave early each summer because the kids were in school). I also told the customer to call her credit card company, because she only had one credit card receipt, and it was very unlikely we'd actually charged her credit card twice.
It turned out Janelle had messed up this woman's reservation to the point that she gave up and started over. But she had already printed out the first receipt (our computer system was separate from the credit card machine) and put it in an envelope with a reservation letter, and then was dumb enough to just leave it, and not tell anyone, so they both went out in the mail. It took a good four hours to straighten everything out between the accountant, the record in the computer, and the hysterical customer. Luckily Janelle left when she said she was going to, and we had another worker come in who was almost equally dumb, but at least mostly willing to ask us questions when she didn't know something.
Which reminds me of another story about Janelle: once she told some customers over the phone that they could rent a kayak for a week, keeping it overnight. The only things we rented overnight were canoes - kayaks and boats had to be returned at the end of the day. They showed up expecting a weekly rental and Boss Man had to make up a special rental rate for them. He was not happy. Not that he was ever happy, but that, my friends, is a 16-page rant that will probably never see the light of day on CS...
One day I get this panicked phonecall from a guest who's coming in about a month. She says she got two letters in the mail from us confirming her reservation, and two receipts, each showing that we'd charged her $2XXX. We had package deals available on which the customer had to pay the full amount rather than a deposit, and she'd gotten one of those. She was understandably upset to be charged $4XXX rather than $2XXX. I told her I'd look in the system and get in contact with our accountant, who was in another state (she was the mother of Boss Man's kids and they had to leave early each summer because the kids were in school). I also told the customer to call her credit card company, because she only had one credit card receipt, and it was very unlikely we'd actually charged her credit card twice.
It turned out Janelle had messed up this woman's reservation to the point that she gave up and started over. But she had already printed out the first receipt (our computer system was separate from the credit card machine) and put it in an envelope with a reservation letter, and then was dumb enough to just leave it, and not tell anyone, so they both went out in the mail. It took a good four hours to straighten everything out between the accountant, the record in the computer, and the hysterical customer. Luckily Janelle left when she said she was going to, and we had another worker come in who was almost equally dumb, but at least mostly willing to ask us questions when she didn't know something.
Which reminds me of another story about Janelle: once she told some customers over the phone that they could rent a kayak for a week, keeping it overnight. The only things we rented overnight were canoes - kayaks and boats had to be returned at the end of the day. They showed up expecting a weekly rental and Boss Man had to make up a special rental rate for them. He was not happy. Not that he was ever happy, but that, my friends, is a 16-page rant that will probably never see the light of day on CS...
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