Hello all! Need some quick recs, my brother and I are gonna be watching spooky movies tonight and I need some solid ff recs for a guy who likes Strange Harvest and similar mockumentary style ff! He didn't really vibe with Horror in the High Desert or Noroi (too slow and the atmosphere didn't really work for him.)
Night auditor here, had a fascinating experience tonight that I felt the need to immediately relay for the sheer entertainment value. We had a guest arrive tonight at around midnight, in from NYC. She rolls up to the desk, proudly and confidently saying she has a reservation. I check the system, no one under her name due in tonight. No one in house under her name. Then, out of sheer curiosity, I check our no shows.
She was booked to arrive two days ago.
To her own admission, she did not make any attempt to call the desk at any point prior to arriving tonight about her not being able to arrive which, on top of being a third party booking, basically meant that no, we can't do much of anything.
The shock on her face when she was informed that no, we didn't "hold onto" her room for her was utterly priceless. She spent the next fifteen minutes unable to understand, repeating questions and effectively refusing any answer. Got her booked into a room for the night, but she was insistent that she would be "making calls."
To whom, I have no idea.
What's more shocking about all of this is that this isn't the first time recently that I've had this sort of interaction. In years of working audit, I haven't seen this sort of thing be this much of an issue this consistently, and in all cases with folks from the eastern US. Not sure what to make of that, but I'm wondering if y'all have been seeing an uptick in folks just outright refusing to understand how bookings and not showing up for them work.
Hello all! Night auditor of five years here. This is a bit of a meandering ramble but I promise there's a point.
I was having a conversation this morning with our security guard about the fact that we carry a big tube of powdered creamer that I've never once seen used. We've held onto it for ages and I know for a fact that I've asked about it to various managers over the years and never quite gotten a clear response as to why we still have it. This comes on the heels of the dozens of conversations I've had over the last few months as to why we no longer make decaf coffee for the lobby in the morning. In that case, however, I was given a clear answer from management: nobody was drinking it. The easy answer to the lines of logic here is clear enough: the powdered creamer has no real labor required to simply pull it out of the cabinet and leave it sitting on the counter, never to be touched, while the decaf coffee requires the use of a full tank and the time needed to make sure you put the right packets in the kettle.
This whole chain of thought and conversation ended up pushing me towards a series of broader reflections on my time as an auditor and a recent development that shook me, surprisingly, to my core. Anybody who's had the distinct displeasure of working the night audit has dozens of stories under their belt about the complete nightmare that can be a hotel at 3 in the morning. A year and a half ago, both of my sideview windows were smashed by a local transient with a fondness for bats. I've had security guards actively relapse on the job and launch into racist, homophobic, you name it, tirades. I've been sexually harassed by guests well past 4 AM and have had to deal with endless complaints that I could not address due to having no other staff on at night. I've had hot coffee thrown at me and various degrees of threats and craziness thrown at me with greater frequency. In the first month of working as an auditor, I had an on-site overdose death that I was left having to handle solo.
All of that is to say that after five years, I've learned I can put up with a lot of crap. I can withstand the screaming of a guest who's just arrived to learn their room was unavailable due to an overbooking that I repeatedly warned management about. I can withstand the woman who rambled about the fact that Satan was actively prowling our halls at night. I attribute a lot of that to the fact that, on the other side of it, I have historically not ever had to deal with the general workplace politics and interpersonal bullshit that can pop up during the day shift. I kept close the advice I was given by the woman who trained me on the shift: you're a ghost. Night audit's job is, more than anything, to be largely unremarkable and forgotten except by accounting.
As a result, I've generally kept out of the ring when it comes to the general mess. However, this last Tuesday I was dragged into a general front office meeting I was struck by an immense and total panic. Three months ago, our FOM and GM both left the property and the resulting scramble was a total shit show that ended up revealing years of embezzlement and general managerial dysfunction that left the new GM in something of a tailspin. The new FOM that came in with him initially seemed like a good change of pace. Communicative, direct, and generally seeming to try and help get things back up and running.
This was until he brought on a round of new hires. Generally, I'm not the kind of person to judge on age, but the new FOM has apparently intentionally gone out of his way to hire all younger men (18-20) with no prior workplace experience and clearly no real sense of professional decorum both with one another and with guests. For about a month, I'd be hearing from the other old guard desk agents about what I can only describe as a litany of sexual harassment, incredibly gross comments, and incredibly poor behavior from the new guys (ignoring guests while on their phones for ten+ minutes). This came on the heels of one of the new guys (an 18 year old with no prior experience and generally poor at best professional behavior) being promoted to a shift supervisor three weeks after he was hired.
As a rule, I try to remain impartial until I actually see this sort of stuff myself. This pulls us to the meeting on Tuesday. The moment I sat down, it felt like I was in a 6th grade gym locker room. Gross sexual comments, casual use of racial slurs, and a total inability to sit down or stay quiet for more than thirty seconds. I had hoped that, perhaps once the meeting started it would settle. Instead, when one of the more mannered new guys asked about when he would be able to go for lunch, the FOM said, "You'll have to kiss me first."
Odds are I'm lucky, but I've never really seen anything like that in my time working in hotels and it sent me into a genuine, deep moral and professional panic that I have no idea what to do with. I know for a fact that corporate HR has already had a hostile workplace complaint opened about the new team and management, but I really didn't quite understand just how extensive it was. I'm 26, I don't think I should be at the point in my life where I feel like I have to clutch pearls over the "new generation" being unable to function in the professional space, and yet here I am. I've never felt the distinct need to file complaints and concerns with the GM and corporate over anything staff related before and yet here I am drafting letters I know nobody will read.
Do you guys still serve decaf coffee? And do you carry powder creamer?