A guest comes down asking for my assistance in her room due to a disagreement between herself and her boyfriend.

Guest: “[Boyfriend] has caused some property damage and I just want someone there in the room with me while I pack a bag to leave so nothing else is damaged.”

I grab the cordless and head up as there are two of us on the desk today. I get to the room with her, and I just chill in the living room while the guy is in the bedroom packing his bag and speaking quietly on the phone.

I don’t go near him as he isn’t doing anything to cause alarm and is packing a bag to leave. I can’t hear a single thing he is saying and just make small talk with the guest and her kids.

Ten minutes into waiting up there, a woman barges in as the door was not completely shut and she starts going off on the other lady and myself.

Woman: “I heard my son tell you multiple times to get out of the room and you’re just being rude and talking s*** back to him!”

The man comes out of the bedroom with his bag packed and starts getting on me too.

Man: “That’s right! You need to leave the room!”

I’m bewildered how this went from me quietly being there to make sure no damage happens to hotel property to getting yelled and screamed at.

At this point, I have officially called the cops. I stay in the room still, as I have noticed some hotel items damaged in the room earlier. I stay on the line with the police, while this woman still yells and screams in my face until a policeman finally appears in the doorway.

He enters, I get off the phone, and ask to be let out of the room since there are police there now to make sure no damage happens to the room. He lets me out, and another officer comes up and asks me for my side of what happened. 

I explain everything to him and let him know that the woman is not allowed on our premises after she leaves with her son. I get on the elevator which so happens to have my coworker on it as she was coming up to see if I was alright, as thirty minutes have passed by this time!

I look at her and just break down: straight-up panic attack. It takes me a good two hours to fully be okay again.

Not even two months later, the guy hits me up on a dating app. I told him to go check on his momma, see if she has yelled at any more front desk assistants since me, and blocked him.

I work at a hotel near a major airport, so we have an airport shuttle to take our guests back and forth. Our shuttle runs 24/7 but we only have one shuttle due to a staff shortage. Currently, it runs on a half-hour schedule, so it leaves the hotel on the top and bottom of the hour and picks up at the airport on the 15 & 45.

The only way to be fair to our guests and keep the schedule accurate is to leave the hotel right on the dot and we only wait a few minutes IF you called down ahead of time to let us know you were running late.

Because the shuttle only fits so many people, we tell our guests at check-in to sign up for a time slot so we can ensure we don’t end up with twenty people showing up for a shuttle that only fits twelve.

Most of us at the desk explain to the guests that they need to be in the lobby five minutes before the time they signed up for as the shuttle leaves right on time and does not wait.

A guest who signed up for a 7 AM shuttle comes down at 7:03 AM.

Me: “I’m sorry, sir, but the shuttle has departed, and you will need to wait for the next available shuttle.”

Guest: “Reserve me another shuttle immediately!”

Me: “Sir, we’ve signed you up for the next shuttle at 7:30 AM.”

Guest: “I want to reserve a shuttle right now! I had already reserved myself a shuttle for 7 AM.!”

Me: “Sir, you are signed up for the next available shuttle.”

This just gets me another insistence that he had RESERVED the shuttle. I realize that he is under the impression that he is oh-so-special and the shuttle was leaving at 7 AM for him specifically rather than leaving at 7 AM for our guests in general.

I try to explain to him that no, he did not reserve a shuttle specifically for himself that was guaranteed to take him when he needed it, but rather he just put his name down to let us know how many people to expect for the already scheduled departure. Of course, he’s super special and important so he keeps reiterating that he had reserved a shuttle and therefore we need to get another shuttle for him immediately.

Me: “Sir, we have one driver so there’s no way to get another shuttle going right now for you.”

This is met with… you guessed it… “bUt I rEsErVeD iT.”

Me: “No, sir, you did not reserve the shuttle. You said you’d be here for the 7 AM shuttle and then you were late, and it left. Your wife came down five minutes later so even if you had bothered to let us know you were going to be late we wouldn’t have been able to wait that long for the entire party to be ready.”

I will say, the one good thing he had going for his behavior was that he never invoked his status (highest status at our hotel outside of lifetime or owner status) but he did ask for the manager’s card and I’m sure we’ll get a bad review out of it.

Back in the early 1990s, I was working for a small family hotel. They had a front desk system that was ancient and did not have a backup system. I was working the night audit shift, and the power went out.

I came to find out that the owner had not paid the electric bill. When they finally got the power back on, the system would not reboot. The owner called me an “f*****’ b***job” because I could not get the system back the next day.

I walked out and never looked back.

I’ve been a housekeeper at various hotels for many years. I don’t have children, but anyone who has ever been a child, met a child, or had to clean up after a child knows that their messes can get pretty destructive. I can instantly tell when a child has been in any hotel room I’ve had to clean — fruit gummies, cracker pieces, snack crumbs, and questionable sticky smears all over the floors and usually every other surface, etc.

One day, I’m at work and I have a lot of rooms to do, and they are pretty bad today. A hockey team has just come through and booked most of the hotel, and the hockey crowd is usually pretty messy. 

I’m in one of the rooms cleaning up the ungodly mess when I see a little boy, maybe eight years old, exit the room across the hall from the room I’m in. He just stands there all bundled up for the winter, presumably waiting for his parents to follow him out of the room. Pretty soon, the room door opens, and out follow his parents along with two younger siblings:  another boy about six years old and a little girl who is around three or four.

They leave with their luggage — which housekeepers always keep an eye on because when waiting for rooms to free up for cleaning, there’s not a moment to lose — so I pop my head out and check the room number they’ve left from. I reference my list of rooms to see if it’s assigned to me or a different housekeeper. It’s my room. 

I groan internally, anticipating the enormous mess I’ll have to deal with from three young children once I get into that room. I finish the room I’m currently working on, close the door, and take a deep breath before letting myself into the next room — the one I know will be trashed by the three young children.

I open the door, bracing myself for a bloodbath of piles of trash, scattered food, sticky messes, and other forms of chaos children on vacation leave in their wake. To my absolute shock, the room is one of the tidiest and cleanest I have ever stepped foot in, in all my years of housekeeping.

There is zero trash anywhere other than a few discarded items in the provided trash bins, surfaces are crystal clean, there are zero floor crumbs, and there is not one gummy candy, fish cracker, or juice box to be found. They even tidied both beds to where they almost looked freshly made. They used only a couple of towels and stacked them neatly next to the bathroom door. (Most families use every single provided towel and washcloth and leave them in a giant sopping wet pile inside the bathtub, which is a nightmare to pick up, because it’s extremely heavy, not to mention kind of gross.)

I’m flabbergasted, to say the least. It takes me record time to thoroughly clean and sanitize the room for the next guest(s), and I’m very grateful to the family for being so conscientious and for the immaculate state they left their room. If I hadn’t seen the family with three young children in tow physically leaving the room with my own eyes, no amount of convincing would have gotten me to believe that there had been anyone in that room other than one single neat-freak adult.

Thank you, random family, for making my otherwise rough day that much easier. You rock.

I work in a hotel. An older gentleman walks in wanting a room.

Customer: “Can I pay cash?”

Me: “Yes, but I still need a card for incidentals.”

He looks at me for a few minutes and asks again:

Customer: “But I just want to pay cash.”

Me: “That’s fine, but I need a card for ‘just in case’.”

Customer: “Do I look like a criminal?!”

Me: “No, sir, but it’s our policy.”

Customer: “What if I sign a piece of paper swearing an oath that I won’t steal or break anything?”

Me: “I’m afraid that wouldn’t work, sir.”

Customer: “This is America, and it’s a d*** shame you can’t use a g***d*** buck to buy a hotel room!” 

We didn’t get his business that night…