Convicted By His Convictions

(I work in a five-star hotel in Amsterdam. It is standard policy that guests give their credit card number upon check-in, or a cash deposit if they do not have a credit card. If they use up a lot of their credit, sometimes reception has to contact the guest for an extra cash deposit. We notice on a Saturday that a guest has completely spent his deposit on watching pay TV of a certain explicit nature. My coworker rings the guest in his room with the request that he should come down to reception to give us more cash.)

Coworker: *to me* “Well, that did not go down very well. He says he did not spend any of his deposit, and he is coming down to reception to see the bill after he is finished praying.”

(At that moment, the elevator door opens and man in full Jewish prayer garb steps out.)

Guest: “I have just been called about my bill, and I would like to see it.”

Coworker: “Sure, I have already printed it out. As you can see, you have watched TV here, here and here, and that is why your balance is so low.”

Guest: “There is no way I watched that filth! Look at me! Do I look like a man who would watch that sort of shocking thing? I don’t understand that a hotel would subject its guests to that kind of immoral muck in the first place. I don’t want anything to do with that! God-fearing people like I should be protected from accidentally zapping to those kinds of channels.”

Coworker: “Well, sir, you did not accidentally zap to that channel. You have to type your room number to activate this program. After five minutes, you get a message on screen that you have to start paying now, and type in the room number again. Then the system asks you to press the confirm button. You cannot do all that by accident. Furthermore, I can see in the records that you watched this channel on three different days for more than two hours at a time. This indicates to me that you have watched a full movie on all these occasions, so I am not satisfied that you accidentally landed on this channel for a few seconds.”

(The guest throws a few banknotes in my coworker’s face and marches off.)

Me: *to coworker* “I have a feeling this is not the end of it”.

(At that moment, the phone rings, and I can see the guest’s room number in the display.)

Me: *to coworker* “It’s your friend from the pay TV room; you’d better take this call.”

Coworker: *on the phone to the guest* “Yes, sir, you told me that you could not understand that a hotel would subject its guests to that kind of immoral muck in the first place, that you did not want anything to do with that, and that God-fearing people like you should be protected from accidentally zapping to that kind of channels. So I put the child lock on so that you did not have to be subjected to the filth anymore. Have a nice day…”