After I left the Ghost Hotel I went to work at another place, where I met Dan. Eventually after 3 years for reasons I don’t understand or can explain, I was let go.
No big deal, if there is one thing I learned from 20 years in radio, PEOPLE GET FIRED, and they get fired for stupid reasons. It’s life.
I got a job at a new hotel about a week after losing the other job. I walked into a job interview and I got it on the spot. They were even promising me that I could move up to management before I even started.
I thought, this is it, this is where I am going to finally find my spot, I’m going to run this joint and everything is going to be completely okay.
There is this thing that tends to happen to me… Whenever something seems too good or too perfect for me, yeah. It isn’t, at all.
To start with, everyone in the hotel community I knew told me this place was a death trap. They’d been robbed at gun point (possibly by an ex-employee) several times while I was working at other hotels on that same street. The hotel changed its name and started over.
Nothing got better.
Some highlights included the guy training me on my first day. For one I actually knew more about the reservation software and system than he did. I actually knew more about it than my boss who literally never came to work unless she had to, thanks to having used the software myself for four years, plus being good friends with one of the people who provides tech support to the company and oh right, Danny worked on this software for 10 years at least. If there was a trick to something when Dan and I worked together, he would show it to me, so I was light years ahead of this guy who was training me.
My problem with him is on my first day, while we’re standing there during a lull, instead of telling me about the hotel, he starts telling me about the owners and how awful they were (and there is more to this coming later…) and then about his wild and crazy sex life.
Dude, I am not a prude by any means, but I’ve known you for what… five minutes now? I don’t even know your last name and you’re telling me about your poly life style that includes BDSM and swinging and I’m just like…. It’s 7am on a Sunday….
The other male coworker I had when I worked my first night shift also made me really uncomfortable in the sense he was telling me that if he was my boyfriend (he would never get that lucky, nope) he wouldn’t “allow,” me to work at night. That a woman’s place is in the home, especially at night. Keep in mind this absolute jewel of a human being was also young enough to be my child.
Literally I could have had this kid at 20 years old and he’s standing there telling me where my place was and that he clearly thought ill of my boyfriend he never met for “allowing” me to work at night. This is the first time I met him. Ugh, whatever.
But wait… there is more!
Most of the time we worked alone after training was over, unless you worked mornings. Then you had a housekeeping staff there, but for the most part they steered clear of me and wouldn’t talk to me. I’ve dealt with this at hotels before. The majority of housekeeping are Mexican Americans and they’ve been treated like shit by the snobby ass white kids at the front desk who make all kinds of assumptions about if the housekeepers are legal or speak English. Like it’s brutal to see up close and I shut that shit down when I see it, but I never had an opportunity to get friendly with our housekeepers.
And apparently I didn’t want to because the same day I was told by my disembodied voice of a boss on the phone that I had to start putting my purse in the lunch room or on top of the housekeeping lockers instead of leaving it on the floor behind the desk out of the way, I got robbed. I hate telling people this part, but it’s true. I had a pair of sunglasses go missing and 40 dollars disappear out of my wallet.
Before you say, why didn’t you watch the cameras, let me assure you there weren’t any cameras on property. At all. No where. Not even watching the desk where I was counting cash twice a shift.
Another fun feature of my job duties at this hotel was if I worked a night shift, I was literally the only person on property after 9pm. At 10:30pm we were supposed to collect the BBQ tools from the BBQ area and bring them inside. Why, right? Who the hell is going to steal a spatula?
Apparently the guy who jumped out of the bushes at me one night while I was doing this. I still have no idea if he was a guest or a homeless person but I think he was pretty fucking surprised to find out I have no problem hitting someone with a spatula and BBQ tongs.
We had another homeless guy break into our pool using a plastic hanger to lift the latch because we didn’t chain the gate at this mad house. I just said fuck it and let him keep swimming in his underwear because I wasn’t going out there to fight some weirdo with a plastic hanger.
Remember I was only there for 11 days… there is still more.
The owners of this place had a dog they would bring into the hotel. It wasn’t pet friendly but of course the owner’s dog isn’t a pet. The dog would hang out with us at the desk while the owner did whatever they pretended to do, including never wondering where the General Manger was because she was never there. One day I saw the owners go out to their car and they had left the dog with us, so I assumed they would be right back.
Logic has no place in that building, though and I get a call three hours later from the owners, who have in fact left in their car to go to Oregon. They had just forgotten their dog in the office and wondered if I could take it home for the weekend.
No. Another coworker who came in after me said “Oh this happens all the time, I’ll take him home.”
What?
A day later, the one semi sane person I worked with comes running in from the parking garage and says “So someone is dead in our parking lot.”
It’s a Saturday morning. I just call the cops. We walk outside to this car that was parked in our parking garage in 100 degree weather, windows up and trunk open. My coworker recognizes the car when we get closer and said she had kicked him out a couple of nights before. When the cops arrive they didn’t actually confirm that this guy was dead but they did tell us that the trunk that was wide open was full of stolen license plates from all over the country.
Yeah… I went back inside to work the desk and pretend this wasn’t a David Lynch movie.
So I was there 11 days and this all happened in the first week.
During my second week there we got a guest who had MS and was fleeing an abusive relationship. All of her belongings were in her car and looking at the reservation for her, the front desk had this woman moving every single night for two weeks to another room and she could barely walk.
Shit like this is easy to fix if you actually pay attention. I rolled up my sleeves and moved a bunch of one night stays to other rooms to keep her in this same room for her entire stay.
I got in trouble for that. It’s pretty standard hotel practice though, it’s easier for housekeeping too, they don’t have to do a full check out clean on an extra room every day, they can just do stay over service for the person, refreshing their towels, taking out the trash, etc. It just makes sense to keep a long term or longer term guest in the same room, especially a disabled guest who really actually needed a ground floor ADA room.
I also got chewed out for helping this woman with her luggage. Pause, I worked for Holiday Inn previously and the Best Western and helping older or disabled people with their things is standard practice. This woman had a massive Mac Pro (the desk top version) that she needed for work but couldn’t lift it onto the desk in her room, so I did it for her and climbed around and plugged everything in and she was delighted. I was told I was wasting time on “unimportant guests” and trying to “provide 5 star service in a two star hotel.”
I was pissed. I stuck it out though for a few more days. This woman came in every morning to get the breakfast and have her water bottle refilled and I would put up the Be Right Back sign and carry her food back to her room. I gave zero fucks about getting in trouble for it because I think you could have sacrificed a goat in that place and not gotten fired.
And then… one day I snapped. I was tired of getting jumped, harassed, zero support from management because the manager never came to work. She sat home on her computer all the time with her online girlfriend, who I heard wasn’t even real, but lord I don’t care about that. That morning the fire alarm (which didn’t actually even call the fire department, they had forgotten to pay that bill,) went off every five minutes and no matter how many times I reset it, it just kept screaming.
I was tired of working in a place that didn’t care about their guests or employee’s safety and literally made zero sense and being asked to baby sit the dog and getting yelled at for doing a better job than anyone else, so I quit.
Of course everyone tried to talk me out of it but I was like, nope I can’t stay here another moment and Dan picked me up from work and we went swimming or something.
When we came back to get my last paycheck and to sign the paper that told them why I quit, there was a guy who was just covered in tattoos, even all over his face asleep on the lobby couch. I went to the table to sign things and the table was so wobbly that it actually fell off one leg. I handed the paper work back to them and was handed a hand written personal check for my wages there and then my former coworker said, “Oh by the way, that lady you were taking care of? She died the afternoon after you quit. You were probably the last person to see her alive. We didn’t notice for at least a day.”
Because the last thing I did before walking out the door other than handing in an epic resignation letter detailing all of this nonsense, was take that woman her breakfast. She didn’t come to the lobby so I called her room before we cleaned up breakfast and asked her if she wanted her usual and she said she was hungry but couldn’t walk down. I asked her if it was okay for me to use the master key to come into her room and bring her food and she said yes please. I loaded up her plate, took it to her room, took her water bottle back to the office to fill it up for her and took it back and she thanked me and I locked her room for her and went back up front and the fire alarm was screaming and I quit.
So this all happened in 11, count them 11 days.
This is why I no longer work in the hotel industry.
This shit show of a “hotel” still hits me up to come back every so often. The answer is always going to be no.
(not the actual hotel)
That's some Bourdain-esque "hotel confidential"-level madness.
Wow. I worked at a fancy hotel, and the abuse from management was off the charts, but at least it didn't feel like my life was endangered. Glad you made it out, but that's some traumatizing shit!