Another Problem That Could Be Solved With The Power Of Imagination

I’m about an hour into my shift at a hotel when I get a call from a room.

Guest: “Is your Wi-Fi working?”

Me: “Yes.”

After a pause, he hangs up without saying anything.

A few minutes later, a man comes to the front desk with a laptop, and I figure it’s the guy who called earlier.

Guest: “Are you sure the Wi-Fi is working?”

Me: “It is. In fact, I’m using it right now.”

Guest: “Can you check my laptop to make sure?”

I’m hesitant to do that because I’m not tech support, and we do have a technical support number for guests to call. I hand him the number.

Guest: “Just check my laptop to make sure I’m connected.”

I look at the screen and it’s on his bookmarks. It’s a lot of adult sites from what I can tell by briefly skimming it.

Me: “Did you press ‘agree’ on our Wi-Fi connection page?”

Guest: “What?”

I show him how to do that, and he’s connected. He returns to his room.

A few minutes later, he calls back.

Guest: “Why is the Wi-Fi still not working?”

Me: “Sir, load our website.”

Guest: “It connected just fine. But I’m still having trouble loading my personal sites.”

I take that to mean adult sites, and our Wi-Fi won’t load those, but I don’t say that. Sometimes people ask me candidly why they can’t connect to those sorts of sites and I just give a generic answer about how our Wi-Fi filters out certain sites for security reasons and they can call technical support for more information if they wish.

This guy, however, is being rather cagey about it and probably isn’t aware I saw his bookmarks, and I’m not about to step on that landmine, so I again refer him to our technical support number.

Guest: “Why can’t you help me?”

Me: “Sir, if you can load our website, you are, in fact, connected.”

He comes back down a few minutes later.

Guest: “I called technical support, and they referred me back to you without helping me!”

That’s not true because they’ll call us if it’s a hardware issue on our end and it isn’t that he just can’t load his adult content over our network.

He then demands a refund, which I refuse because our Wi-Fi IS demonstrably working and he has been in the room for hours. He asks what I can do for him since he probably won’t get any sleep tonight and will probably have to sleep in his car because apparently all his money is tied up in our hotel.

Me: “I’ll let the managers know about your issue, but for the reason I cited, I cannot give you a refund.”

He looks at me for a moment.

Guest: “We’ll see.”

Then, he left. That was a little ominous. It was not exactly a threat, either, but something I will definitely write in our logbook.