Locked Himself Out Of His Own Understanding

(I work in a large complex. Two buildings are the hotel, where we sell rooms per night, but three buildings are for monthly rental, like apartments. In both cases, people check in at the hotel’s front desk. One day, an older man comes in wanting to visit a room to rent for the month. I make him a magnetic swipe key for one of the rooms so that he may go visit it. A good ten minutes later, he comes back, looking rather flustered.)

Guest: “There is no lock to put the key in!”

Me:  “What do you mean, there is no lock?”

Guest: “Just that: there is no lock in the door! There is one on the building door, which I swiped, and it worked, but on the room door there is nothing in the door to swipe the key.”

(I recall that our maintenance staff have been having issues with the locks lately, are waiting for new ones to be delivered, and have been taking locks from currently unavailable rooms and putting them on available ones so that those rooms may still be sold. I think perhaps they have taken the lock from this particular room and forgotten to alert the front desk. I apologize to the man and offer to let him visit another room, in the same building.)

Guest: “Well, is it going to work this time, or am I only going there for nothing again?”

Me: *thinking there is no way maintenance could have forgotten twice to block a room* “There should be no problem.”

(I make him a key and let him go, but he returns in less than two minutes and starts yelling at me.)

Guest: “What the f*** are you doing to me? Are you having fun with me?”

Me: “No, sir. What—”

Guest: “There is nowhere to put the key in that one, either! You take those two rooms off your list, now! Who’s your manager? I want to see him, now!”

(I explain that my manager is going to be here later tonight, and the man storms off, promising to come back. Puzzled by what the man seemed so adamant about, I call my houseman to check the two rooms to see what is going on. He comes back to me and says he got in, no problem, and that there is nothing wrong with the locks to the room. He doesn’t understand why the man said there wasn’t a lock. He stops to think one second and says:)

Houseman: “Well… it’s a different model of lock than the one on the building’s door.”

Me: “How so?”

Houseman: “Well, most of our locks are like the one on the building’s door, which requires the key card to be held at a perpendicular angle from the door, with only the magnetic stripe sliding through. The model on those rooms, though, is the one for which you have to hold the key flat against the door lock and slide the whole card down into the slit.”

(I instantly recalled what he was talking about, as I have naturally seen them myself, but I couldn’t believe anyone couldn’t figure out how to put the key in them. When I retold the story to my manager, when he came in, he laughed so hard he said it would be a pleasure to point the man’s lack of intelligence to him should he come back to see him. He never did, unfortunately.)