Their Reputation With The Hotel Is Burned

I work as a night auditor at a hotel. One night, a guest calls down from their room, complaining that the smoke alarm is going off in the room next to them. I go up to investigate and can hear the smoke alarm all the way down the hall. When I get there, I knock on the door.

The guest opens the door, revealing that the entire room is filled with smoke. I ask what’s going on and the guest casually responds, “I’m cooking,” apparently not noticing or caring that her cooking has completely burned and she is sitting in the middle of a huge cloud of smoke. From the glimpse of the charcoal that I see on the stove, it looks like one of the things she was cooking was ravioli.

How one manages to burn ravioli, I don’t know.

After silencing the smoke alarm, I tell the guest that we are going to have to move her to a new room. She asks — again, completely nonchalantly — “Why? Is there something wrong with this one?” In the most un-sarcastic voice I can muster, I respond that yes, the fact that the room is filled with smoke counts as “something wrong.”

I don’t know whether she is “out of it” somehow or just playing dumb in order to avoid getting in trouble, but either way it is pretty disturbing that she was willing to sit around breathing in smoke.

The best part, though, is what my manager tells me when he comes in to help deal with the situation. The room where this incident happened is the exact same room where, a few months ago, a guest hung their clothes on one of the sprinkler heads, causing it to break and setting off the sprinklers in half the hotel.

I suggest to my manager that we get rid of that room and turn it into a closet. He laughs and agrees.