Assistant Assistant Manager

Part Five: Never Be A Swooning Wiseass

The women were as bad as the men. One day while working a Day Shift, an attractive middle aged woman wearing a 1980’s Power Suit with shoulder pads and pencil skirt waltzed into my office and threw a hardcore porno magazine onto my desk with a flourish befitting a lathered up martinet.

She exclaimed to me with appropriate dramatics that she had found this disgusting material in her room and that it was so upsetting to her ladylike sensibilities that all of her hotel charges should be comped.

I looked her up in the computer and her room was a suite, and she had been there a full week with lots of room service, booze, and long distance telephone charges. She owed the hotel thousands of dollars and now she wanted everything for free because she had found a dirty magazine.

Initially she had startled me and made me jump, but the ice in my veins was going to prevail. Or so I thought. I told her that it isn’t hotel policy to leave hardcore pornography in guests rooms like an after dinner mint delicately placed upon their nighty-night pillow.

The hotel didn’t put it there, obviously she would have to pay her bill in full.

Refusing to note my name tag, she called me a name, curtly stating she didn’t care about my lame excuses, she had found lurid erotic materials in her suite, and therefore she refused to pay!

I asked her exactly where she found the magazine that was now lying face up on my desk that I was trying to ignore. She told me that she had found it in one of the nightstands in between the telephone books. I told her that this proved my point, that the hotel did not place the magazine in her room, a previous guest did. Housekeeping didn’t remove it because they didn’t realize that it was there, and we didn’t have a pornography inspector on staff.

She became very angry with me calling me a different name, and she began flipping the pages of the magazine just to show me how raunchy it was, all the while shouting that if I didn’t comp her, she would tell everyone she knows what a horrible hotel the Sir Francis Drake is!

At this point I was extremely weary of working in a fancy hotel. Frankly, I was at the end, but I just didn’t realize it yet. And now I was being screamed at by a crazy elegant stranger who was making me look at pornography with her.

Nowadays this would be a court case of some sort, but this was the late 1980’s so I had to handle it myself. I told her that while being utterly out of her league, I was quite flattered by her attentions, and that this was certainly the most intriguing and mysterious seduction of my life, ever! Swoon.

But I was too brokenhearted by life itself to take her up on her very attractive proposition. Swoon again.

Being a wise ass was definitely a mistake. I had touched the third rail of swanky hotels, which is no matter how much a guest verbally abuses you, never ever talk back. She seethed at me for this. It was almost frightening.

I knew that she was lying to me about everything, and that she was a talented confidence artist. Besides that, she kind of looked like one of the women in the magazine. My glasses were brand new, I swear it!

I had to get rid of her. So I offered her one free night. Again, she demanded all of it. I told her no. Right about then I knew I was cooked. If I comped her everything, the General Manager would murder me. If I didn’t comp her and she went on to make trouble, the General Manager would hire a hit man to murder me.

I told her again that it was one night comped or nothing at all. Take it or leave it. She called me a third name (again) and demanded to speak with my superiors who in her opinion were any sentient creatures on the earth.

I told her that the General Manager was at lunch. This was a lie. He was actually with his secretary in a vacant suite and was not to be disturbed during such dalliances. I told her she could wait for his return in the lobby and I would have her paged upon his arrival. She agreed.

When he returned I briefed him on the ordeal, sending the concierge out to stroll the lobby with her name written on a chalkboard, and then he saw her. When she came out of his office twenty or so minutes later, she had been comped everything, including the remainder of her stay.

He even sent flowers to her suite and I was in very deep trouble because I had failed to shield him. She gave me a look that said “I know that you know I’m a confidence artist, but I won and you just lost.”

Then there are the mundane guests with their so very ordinary tiresome and lame antics. The man who complains about his pork chop, the drunk and disorderly barfly, men in fistfights, women in cat fights, domestic violence that you have to get in the middle of with the house detectives, vandalism of hotel property, weasels demanding upgrades, the all around complainers who begin their diatribes at the moment of checking in, the stoned middle aged school teacher attending a convention who decides to get undressed and dance naked in the Starlight Roof Lounge.

To be continued shortly…