Room With A Screw

I am working on reception at a fairly up-market hotel. A female customer comes to check out. She is attractive but looks very tired.

She has been with us for a fortnight and in that time she has never allowed housekeeping into her room. She has requested many new towels, though, leaving the dirty ones outside her door for pick-up.

We have been suspicious about her for a while, thinking she is probably a prostitute. This is against our rules, but the hotel is quite big and people can enter the premises without coming under the nose of reception staff, so it’s hard to catch them out. As long as their customers are discreet and they don’t cause a noise complaint or similar anti-social issue, there’s not much we can do about it.

When I print out the bill, she offers me a wad of cash, many thousands of dollars. We don’t have a credit card imprint, because she checked in with a cash bond, instead. I smile and tell her it will just be a couple of minutes, as we have to check her mini-bar, and dash up to her room.

It is an absolute ruin.

The carpet is dotted with hundreds of burns, where cigarettes have been flicked onto the floor. It’s also stained with food and wine.

The curtains have sweat marks on them. The glass is cracked in the shower. The bed is a wreck, structurally broken at one end and horribly stained across the mattress.

And the whole room stinks of body odour and smoke. It is absolutely overpowering, making me want to retch. We are a non-smoking hotel, and it smells like she was burning tyres in there.

I march back down to reception and let her know we have to repaint the room, replace the carpet and furniture, and charge her for the week it will take to do it. This is a standard charge for room-wreckers, which adds more than $20,000 to her bill.

She pays at once. In cash.