When you work at a hotel, one of the unfortunate skills you pick up — as long as you’re paying any attention — is how to spot people who are, more than likely, using illicit funds such as stolen credit cards.

We have one group check into two rooms and, after only a couple of days, they are showing very obvious signs: they keep extending their reservation day by day — you never know when the real card owner is going to twig to the issue, after all — spending exorbitant amounts of money at the bar and in the cafe, and tipping incredibly high amounts — still always put on room charges — in spite of wearing very ratty clothes and never appearing to go to work at any point in nearly a week at the hotel. 

They single themselves out further by being poorly-behaved guests on top of that: they have pets in the room that are clearly not house-trained, the housekeepers complain of the pet and smoke odor whenever they go to clean the room, and they are up at all hours and harass me — the night worker — to open the cafe so they can grab snacks, even if it’s only going to be twenty minutes until it’s officially open.

Finally, the biggest red flag pops up — they want to move into the Presidential suite. Not only is this also a hallmark of people burning through money that isn’t theirs, this is our most expensive room, and we only have two of them. They are frequently needed for VIPs coming in for several-thousand-dollar conferences and events. We absolutely cannot afford to have these people destroy one.

Thankfully, they ask me first, probably assuming that since I work my shift alone I won’t be privy to their antics. I lie and say that both Presidential suites are occupied, and in the morning I alert my manager and the morning shift to their new angle. Everyone agrees: these people cannot be in the Presidential.

Or at least, I think everyone agrees.

A couple of days later, I come in and get a call… from the Presidential… with this group’s name on the caller ID.

I have a coworker on the evening shift who is notorious for giving people whatever they want, whether it makes sense or not. We all complain about the messes he creates in his wake, but unfortunately, he’s incredibly popular with guests — because he gives them free things, duh — and he makes so much money off of the bonuses he gets from guests leaving him positive comments that any redirection falls on deaf ears, and nothing he does is quite egregious enough on its own to warrant a write-up.

He moved this group to the Presidential.

I tell my manager as soon as he comes in the next day and he’s floored. He had just had a conversation with my coworker that night about how sketchy these people were, so it wasn’t like he was unaware. I wish him luck and head home.

The next night, the group is gone. Apparently, my manager went to the GM, who heard these terrors were in our most expensive room and said, “HECK NO!” They were told very firmly to leave — though not before one of their cohorts got caught smoking crack in the parking lot, so that was fun, too. They had caused incredible damage to the rooms they’d been in for more than a week, including a broken window. We’re in tornado country. It’s hard to break those windows. They were charged for all of it, but who knows if we’ll actually get to keep it if it turns out it wasn’t their card, as we suspect.

Thankfully, the Presidential is only moderately trashed. My coworker has had a couple of days off since the shift where he reassigned them, but I doubt his return to work will be pleasant.

This takes place in a government office where people often come to do research. There is one copy machine in the entire room for however many people are in there, usually 10 to 20. Everyone who is there regularly is careful not to take too much time on the machine out of respect for everyone else. 

On this particular day, an older gentleman decides to make some copies of pages in a book. He gets to the machine just before I do and stares at it for a good half minute. I offer to help him, tell him where to position the book, show him where to put the money in, tell him it’s 50 cents a page, and show him which button to push for copies. He makes one copy, waits until there is no more noise coming from the machine, looks around for the copy, takes it out, reads it carefully, then puts it down on the table next to him. He then reads the book some more, looking for the next page he wants to copy. Same routine: make one copy, read it carefully, put it down. Then, he needs more money. He digs in his pocket for his zippered pouch, which takes half a minute. He opens the zipper, digs around in it for a while, pulls out a plastic bag, digs around for a dollar bill, puts the rest of the money back in the bag, puts the bag back in the pouch, and then put the pouch back in his pocket. He looks for the next page he wants to copy, copies it, reads it carefully, etc. He runs out of money, digs the pouch out of his pocket again, takes at least two minutes extracting another dollar bill, puts everything away again, and slowly and carefully makes two more copies. He realizes he needs more money, takes the pouch out of his pocket again…

I finally suggest that he take the book off to the side to figure out which pages he wants to copy rather than stand there. 

It takes him a full twenty minutes to make seven copies. The three people in line behind me give up and find something else to do.

My home Internet connection went offline earlier, so I went through the steps that the cable company instructs when we call for disruption: unplug the router and cable modem, wait thirty seconds, plug in the cable modem, let it re-sync, plug in the router, let it re-sync, try to connect. It connected, but then it went down again less than twenty minutes later, so I called the support line.

The tech did a reset from their end, and after the service came back up, she told me that if it went down again to call them again or contact them on their website. She couldn’t explain to me how to contact their website when the Internet connection is down.

About ten years ago, I was a starting manager at a popular fast food location on a Saturday and had to close for the night. I had some issues with an employee during the closing shift, but that’s not for today. When I was finished with all my duties, I tried to set the inner alarm one hour later at 3:15, but after a minute, it went off. So, I had to turn it off and answer the call from the security company, and I had to direct them to my supervisor for the secret question. This went on three times, and then it was escalated to the restaurant manager. He called me to let me know to not set the alarm for the inner area, as I locked the door and the alarm would be set for the outer area in about 30 minutes by the cleaning crew. 

Around 3:30, I wanted to go to my bike to head home. That’s when I noticed a car with a running engine, standing in the dark next to my bike. Because it’s considered a security risk — due to a possible robbery — it was procedure to stay inside and call the local police. They were on site with three cars within five minutes. They had one regular police van, a car with a spotlight and a camera, and a car with a dog handler. The officer on the phone asked me to stay inside and turn on the drive-thru microphone so the police on site could contact me without me getting in danger, and to stay away from the windows, so I did. 

On the cameras in the management office — in the inner alarm area — I saw an officer talk to somebody in the car, and after a while, a guy came out. The dog handler took his dog and let it search the car and the area around it. After a while, the officer came to the drive-thru microphone and began to speak to me. The guy was a businessman, and he was using our free WiFi to watch p*rn at night because the WiFi at the hotel was paid. 

Within a month, all restaurants had a feature installed that closed down the free WiFi an hour after their scheduled closing times.

I’m currently on maternity leave, two or three months before I’m due back to work, and I realise that I still have a lot of vacation days left over. I ask a colleague who I should talk to about scheduling my vacations — there have been some personnel changes while I was gone — and she tells me to talk to [Superior #1]. She also tells me that technically, all vacation times had to be planned by last November — I was already on maternity then and it’s now June — which nobody told me about. No big deal since we don’t have any trips planned; I figure I’ll just talk to [Superior #1] and get some time off scheduled when nobody else is on vacation. Whatever works. 

I email [Superior #1], asking if I can come see her about when to schedule my time off. She emails me back saying, of course, I can come to the office about that. 

I make an appointment, take my baby with me, ride through half the city, and go to the office. 

When I arrive there, [Superior #1] greets me warmly, and then proceeds to tell me that while she can show me the schedule of who is going away when, I really need to talk to [Superior #2] about when I want to take my time off. 

I just stand there, flabbergasted, with my baby in a carrier, wondering why exactly she couldn’t have told me from the start that she wasn’t the person to talk to about that issue.