I work in a hotel. I have a couple in a king suite that has been extending day by day. We only have three of those room types, and for whatever reason, we are selling out this weekend, so when the woman wants to extend again, I tell her she can, but we’ll have to switch her to a different room type.

Apparently, this is the crime of the century on my part.

Guest #1: *Grumbling* “This is bulls***. I can’t believe you’re making me do this. This is so inconvenient!”

Me: “I’m sorry, but we only have three of those room types and other people reserved them.”

Guest #1: “This makes absolutely no sense. Don’t you have any sense of customer loyalty?! I’ve stayed here for three nights!”

The boyfriend actually has an understanding of this really basic thing, but he’s pretty obsequious. He’s kind of trying to be like, “I mean, I get it, we don’t really have a choice,” but she’s still tripping.

Guest #1: “Can’t you just downgrade someone else so we can stay in the room?”

Me: “No.”

I think that’s the end of it; they begrudgingly agree to move. However, around one o’clock, housekeeping tells me the couple is still in the room, and I get a call from corporate. They’re calling on these jackanapes’ behalves. I explain to them that I can’t put them in a room we’re sold out of. They seem to understand.

Next, the boyfriend comes down. He’s telling me he gets my side but he also gets her side, and then, he starts coming at me from a strange angle.

Guest #2: “Doesn’t it seem like too much of a coincidence that those rooms would all be sold on the same date?”

Me: “We’re selling out — we hardly have any rooms left — so the odds are somewhere around 100%.”

Guest #2: “Man, she’s really riding me over this, I’ll give you $100 — no, $300 — right now!”

Me: “No.”

I get the sense that he has an unenviable relationship dynamic where he’s expected to stand by his woman no matter how beyond the pale insane she’s being. She’s the type of crazy where if you prove her wrong on a historical fact, she won’t admit she’s wrong; she’ll go on a tirade about the Mandela effect.

Then, I get the second call from corporate, and we have the same exact conversation.

I’m pretty wound up. It’s 2:59, one minute from the end of my shift. I thought everything was squared away, but our maintenance person comes up.

Maintenance: “Hey, [Housekeeper] wants to know what’s going on with [the couple’s suite]; they’re still there.”

Me: *Not yelling, but loudly* “They have to move out of that room, right now!”

I alerted corporate to the situation and told them to hit the street.

I work as a concierge in a very tall hotel. Our hotel lobby is actually on the top floor and access to all the rooms and hotel facilities is below us. An older guest approaches me.

Guest: “I need directions to [Restaurant].”

I take out my work phone to get directions to the restaurant when the guest sneers at it.

Guest: “Ugh, I hate technology. Your generation is far too reliant on it.”

Me: *Ignoring the comment* “Okay, to get to the restaurant, you’re going to need to take a left when you exit the building and—”

Guest: “What? Just print out the directions for me, idiot!”

Me: “I will happily use our technology to print that out for you, ma’am. Also, please note that our elevator technology to your left might not be to your liking, but we have technology-free stairs to your right you might like to use.”

She glared at me as I handed her the printout. 

She complained and I got a write-up, but it was worth it.

I’m working in a hotel around 1:30 am. A guest comes in to check in, so I get his name, check his ID, and verify his reservation.

Me: “All right, will you be parking with us?”

Guest: “Yes.”

Me: “Okay. Parking is $39 a night, plus tax. Let me get you a parking pass.”

Guest: *With a blank smile* “Is that how much it is?”

Me: “It is.”

Guest: “Oh, I don’t want to pay that.”

Me: “Yeah, I know it’s expensive.”

Guest: “You will take the charges off and let me park for free.”

Me: “I’m sorry?”

Guest: “I don’t want to pay that. You will let me park for free.”

Me: *Pauses* “Sir, I can’t just let you park for free.”

Guest: “Yes, you can. I don’t want to pay that.”

Me: “Sir, you’re not a loyalty member, and your reservation is just regular with no parking included. Has something gone wrong that you want this as compensation? What’s your reason behind why you want it for free?”

Guest: “I don’t want to pay that.”

Me: “Sir, not wanting to pay for it isn’t a valid enough reason to get it for free. Nobody here would pay if it was.”

Guest: “But I want it free.”

Me: “Sir, so does everyone who parks here.”

Guest: “You cannot give it to me for free?”

Me: “No, sir, I’m afraid not.”

Guest: “Perhaps your manager will give it to me. May I speak to him?”

Me: “Our general manager isn’t here on account of it being 1:30 am, but you’re welcome to talk to him in the morning. I promise he’s going to say the same thing I did, though.”

Guest: “Perhaps.”

Me: *Pauses again* “Until then, shall I set you up with a parking pass?”

Guest: “Yes.”

My manager was unsympathetic in the morning, and the guy did pay.

Parking is outrageously high everywhere in this city, not just at this location. It’s also an internal, gated garage, though there’s an open city lot nearby that costs about the same.

Sadly, I was, in fact, not the droid he was looking for.

CONTENT WARNING: Physical Injury

I work the front desk graveyard shift at a small residency that mostly houses drug addicts and mentally ill people.

Yesterday, one of the residents got in a big fight with someone claiming he stole her bike. The fight involved him swinging a big chain and her wielding a machete. It ended with him getting a big gash on his back and retreating into his room. Paramedics and police were called, and everything was sorted out.

Today, the first thing we get is a young female tenant going into labor just outside their room. Paramedics come for her.

An hour later, suddenly ten or so police show up, most armed with rifles. They say that there has been a gunshot on the fifth floor. They go upstairs and find that the tenant shot himself in the face with a flare gun while cleaning it. He gets taken away by the paramedics. 

This is all within the first two hours of my shift. I need a vacation so bad.

We have a regular customer who is the manager of a hotel. She is a chronic problem when it comes to credit card data security. The problem is that her hotel uses a credit card machine that isn’t interfaced with our software because that would cost too much, or some excuse like that. We host their software, and because of that, we’re very diligent in making sure credit card data can’t be stored in our software. This customer is also very creative and keeps trying various fields and ways of typing the information to try to defeat our security measures.

We recently rolled out an update with significant improvements to the detection of credit card data in various forms. Basically, the code searches for fifteen or sixteen digits within a certain range of characters, and if it passes a Luhn check [an algorithm for checking whether certain numbers are accurate], we then check if it matches any known issuers. If it does, then ZAP! We remove the numbers and replace them with a notice that explains that they were removed and why entering credit card data like this is bad.

We got another call from this angry customer.

Customer: “Why does your software keep making my credit card numbers vanish?! This is a bug, and you need to fix it! I figured out that if I typed the credit card numbers on four different lines with an asterisk between each line, the numbers wouldn’t get deleted, but then you changed something, and even that won’t work anymore!”

She was entering this into the guest notes section, which has a warning against this in large red letters. I wrote her a response:

Me: “While there isn’t a bug, we did improve the security of the software, and you are seeing the results of that. This change is for your safety as well as ours since we both share liability if the data is compromised.”

Customer: “It isn’t a big deal! If your servers are secure, then there’s nothing to worry about. It’s just a small hotel, after all.”

I can’t wait to see what new method she figures out to store credit card numbers in plain sight.