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Night Shift at the Smiling Inn - Part 1
| First, let me tell you a little bit about this place. Its not really a dump, but its also not really spiffy enough to be considered a "hotel", hence the "Inn" title it has. Its not that the place itself looks bad, its just old, in a "this place hasn't been remodeled since the 80's" kinda look. Thankfully, the new owners are dumping a lot more money into the place than the last guy did. More on that another tie.
Let me now tell you about my first full night on the shift...alone.
| So, I've show up, and the POS system is set up for 2 late arrivals to show up, meaning there's 2 reservations for people who, as of 11pm, haven't come in yet. What I've learned is that there's 3 kinds of people who check into hotels after 11pm:
1) Those who waited until the last possible minute to book their hotel and the first few places they tried had no vacancy,
2) Those who have been driving literally all day and night to get here, and
3) Drunk people, coming from the bar.
| This is a story about a couple in the third category. Those are the most exciting ones, because they're the ones who've already lost their filter. So when this couple waltzes in, stumbling over eachother, I'm preparing to check them in. They're practically making out every break in the conversation, followed by the male repeating "You are one expensive ass bitch" and the female saying "Its ass eating season", repeatedly.
As I'm preparing their room keys, she finally notices me.
| She turns and "whisper" something in the man's ear, (though I say whisper in quotation marks because I think that's what she was trying to do, even though she was loud enough for the entire empty lobby to hear). What she whispers is something along the lines of "Look at this one, he seems cute. You should invite him to the room." This elicits a gaggle of laughter from the man, who then shakes her off and says "You're drunk, baby, I'm so not inviting this random guy to our room."
| She didn't like that answer. So she took it upon herself to begin to ask me questions which, I assume, in her head sounded like a reasonable lead-in to the big question that she wanted to ask me, that she thought I didn't hear her whisper louder than an overexaggerated stage performer.
Her main lead-in question, though, was pretty close to what she wanted to ask:
"Did you know its ass-eating season?"
"Uh...no, no I did not. Thank you for letting me know." I responded promptly.
| "Well, how do you feel about ass-eating season? Have you ever eaten ass?"
At this point her man is trying to recover the conversation, but failing badly in between bouts of his own laughter and repeated comments of "You are one expensive ass bitch", so the best he could really do was continue to go "Baaaaabe, shhhhhh, shh sh sh sh sh", which she entirely disregarded and ignored.
"Uh...N-no, no I have not...eaten ass, before, can't say that I have. That's a...a new one for me..."
| Well, this was apparently a thing to be marveled at. She made the look of surprise as if I had just told her I'd never driven a car before, but by this point I had finished checking in their reservation and wanted to let them figure this out by themselves up in their room, so I returned the guy's ID and credit card, had him sign a few papers, pointed out the elevator hall and let them be on their way. This would be the end of that...or so I thought.
How very, very wrong I was.
| A little while later, the next gentleman rolls in. Solo, most likely from the second category, looking absolutely exhausted. As I'm checking him in, I hear the elevator come back down from the hall, followed by none other than our spotlight couple of the hour. As I'm in the middle of checking in the second guy, this couple approaches again, this time not as laughy.
"Hey man, we can't get into our room, I think there's something wrong with the keycards."
"Oh? Sure thing, one sec."
| As I'm checking in the second guy and I finish giving him his room key after the same procedure, the drunk couple wait, leaning on the counter. I take their room keys from them, reprogram them, while apologizing profusely for my error (which was before I grew some thicker skin after working here for a month), which simply elicited replies of "Just get us in a fucking room dawg, its cool, just get us in a room" from the couple. I hand them the reprogrammed keys, and sent them away.
| A few minutes later, the elevator comes back down, and this time its the same guy, without the girl. Apparently she wanted to sit down and stay with their belongings. He says "Hey dude, its still not working. I think you might just have faulty keys or something."
Now, context, again, this is literally my first night, and I got next-to-no training for a situation like this. I figure what the guy's saying is probably right, even though they're all brand new keycards, and toss them.
| I give them an entirely new set of keys, still apologizing until my face turned red, and tell the guy "if for whatever reason it still isn't working and you come back down, I'll go back up with you and I'll figure it out myself."
The guy asks "Don't you have some kind of master key that opens all the doors?" That's a good question. Wish I knew the answer. Truth is they hadn't been made for us yet, but I didn't know that.
"Uh, no, no we don't have access to that." The man groans.
| He repeats "Alright, well I know its not your fault, so just get us in a fucking room and we'll be square. I know you're trying. We just wanna have some fun in the room you know? Before the buzz wears off too much." I hand him the entirely new room keys, and say "Well I hope these work out for you guys."
He replies "I'll be back if they don't!" with a chuckle, and goes back up the elevator...only to come back down again a few minutes later.
At this point, I want to see it myself.
| I've honestly grown cynical by this point, figuring they were probably just drunk and messing something up, so I decided to leave the front desk and go up to the 4th floor with them. The girl is sitting on the floor with her back to the wall outside of the room, and as I approach with the room keys she speaks up "Hey, look, its that guy again!" as the man replies "Yes, it is. He's gonna get us into our room."
I stick in the room keys. The lights on the door flash red and green.
| Red and green? What the drek does that mean? Normally they just flash red if the room keys aren't working. I'm new here, so clearly I have no clue what this is. I groan, realizing that indeed the drunk couple weren't just too drunk to open the door, there was actually something wrong with it. I apologize again, and figure at this point my only option is to just switch their room. So, I go back down to the front desk with the guy, and upgrade their room to a balcony for the trouble.
| I grab them entirely new room keys for an entirely new room, and decided to go back up to the 4th floor with the guy again just to make extra sure that this room was actually gonna open, and to my joy it finally did. The couple sighed in joy and celebrated. "Dude, fuck yes, THANK YOU." The guy himself literally hugged me, so I figured all was forgiven...
...and as I'm leaving the room, the girl asks "You sure you don't wanna stay for ass eating season?"
The guy closes the door.
| Well, that was an exciting first night. Later, I found out from my supervisor that the red and green flashing lights meant that the door itself needed to be reprogrammed, as a lot of the electronic locks of the doors had to be switched after the place closed down and reopened again. But, again, that's a story for another time.
If you guys and g/u/rls wanna hear more stories from the night shift, let me know, as I'm still working here and I get more and more everyday...
>Peace! ✌
| Working any kind of customer service job is hell. But it sounded like an exciting night~ Hopefully I can read more stories~
-Evening
| >>736725 Glad you enjoyed it! I'll post more when I get around to it for sure. Frankly I've always shared a love-hate relationship with customer service, because even though its wageslavey and I have to deal with the assholes sometimes (which sometimes make for more interesting stories) I gain true enjoyment out of genuine human connection and feeling like I can help brighten other people's day even in a minute, everyday way. Its why I'm writing these too, besides the boredom lmao.
| >>736728
I get what you mean~ I used to work in customer service for a little while, then I got conscripted to be an officer in the military~
I half miss it sometimes, the interactions I had with complete strangers...
Though the other half of me doesn't miss it at all~ Aha~
-Evening
| I used to work at a b/u/rg joint once. That was long time ago though. Won't get into the specifics but I got fired pretty quickly for making fun of someone, guess I'm just not built for it.
-Echo
To be fair, you did insult half the customer that day, you deserved to get fired.
-Sierra
Shh, don't tell them that.
-Echo
| "Ass eating season". This is not something I have heard the colder months called before. Is this popular with the younger citizens of Glitch City?
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| Hello danger/u/, just your everyday average graveyard shift hotel front-desk guy here. I just got hired on at this place about 4 weeks ago now, and normally I don't post a lot on /u/, but I've somehow already had my fair share of interesting tales with this place; so I figured here would be the perfect place to share them.
You see, not everybody really pays attention to the fact that these hotels always have to have someone at the front desk. Specifically, my shifts are 11pm-7am.