I wish you would stop asking me to enforce policy that is illegal or has no basis in reality. "How old do you have to be to check in?" you screeched over and over, to the tune of five emails and a dry erase board covered in foot high letters.
You explained The Policy was 21. I explained The Policy only applied to room service and the lounge area. I explained the law was 18. You sent everyone statutes for the State of Ohio which explained what I told you. So now you've used the wrong words for things (If you want me to represent the hotel in a professional "manor", I'm going to wonder if I'm applying for a large bed and breakfast with significant grounds keeping duties) and can't read legal documents.
You make at least twice as much as I do. In exchange you write incoherent policy and get angry when I follow your memos.
You asked me to call when I evict someone, told me you'd prefer I not evict anyone, but the rates have crashed. The physical plant is deteriorating. Guests are starting to ask if we're going to flip the hotel. You won't read anything not framed in an Excel spreadsheet. I've started to use Excel for things Excel wasn't designed for. I asked to waive no-show fees for people stranded because of the Icelandic volcano and your response was "The airlines aren't canceling any fees, why should we?"
I have captured three times my yearly wages in fees since January.
I didn't feel like arguing. It's shouting at a wall. We're not the airlines, I wanted to say. When you fly, there's only a few games in town and they know this. We're a hotel, an industry with dozens of options in big cities. We need to drop policies and practices that are abhorrent to guests. We won't. We will hemorrhage money.
We oversold the hotel. We do this all the time. You said out of every hundred sold rooms, five will not show up. I said we do not have figures for this economy. You were surprised when they all showed up. A man asks me if I'm retarded, asks, "Is this fucking Russia?" when I explain: we are sold out. You will be staying elsewhere. Of course we are going to pay for this. His hair is gray and he wears camouflage. He looks at me and sees a commie bitch.
Maybe I'm going about this wrong. My job isn't exactly the problem. There are moments where I enjoy the work I do, where I make people experience a genuine happiness, a real care for their well-being. The guests are nice then, they promise to tell my manager, to write a comment or fill out a survey. This never happens. Usually they are too tired. Often, they are too drunk. To work nights is to be phantasmal. Indeed, the best night workers are invisible. No one knows we were here.
A man leers over the front desk, demands to know if a blow job and a beer is too much to ask in a relationship. "Let me watch my football!" he shouts at me, reeking of three kinds of liquor. He bangs his fists on the windows, interior design that is like Donald Trump's hair.
Sometimes I wonder if my interactions with people, my reactions to them, aren't making me more prejudice. Cheap rates cause the most trouble. Expensive rates cause just as much. I have to ask the homeless people to leave. This isn't like the other hotels; I don't have coffee to give them, destined for a sink anyway, or hardened cookies. I called a helpline and asked for pamphlets to give, as though they wouldn't know where the rooming houses and shelters were. The pamphlets are for us to feel better.
I went outside during the day, downtown. There were so many people just standing, not doing anything. Football season. Sometimes they would scream at anyone who dared walk by without Buckeye paraphernalia.
A guest asked about neighborhoods. He said, "You own your home, of course..."
I do not know if daylight will be better.