I love working in the hospitality industry. I think it's the closest thing to being a counselor/psychologist one can achieve with out a college degree. You listen to peoples problems, work towards fixing them(minus the constructive criticism), and help people get to where they're trying to go(in life). Alright so that might be a bit of a stretch but spending 8 hours behind the front desk at a hotel does make for great people watching. In a regular day you see the high maintenance, the passive, the cheap, the drunks, the indifferent, the easy to please,the pretentious,the people that won't let you know that something is wrong with their room until after they check out even though you asked them at least once how they stay was going, and the people that are all around unfathomable. Even though I only have about 9 months in the industry, I figured I had dealt with most of the problems one could encounter working at a hotel: dealing with pissy guests, high school sports teams and their drunk parents, asian tour busses, people who insist they didn't smoke in their room, parties, drugs, prostitutes
and transvestites(but that's a story for another entry). And then June 1st rolled around and I dealt with a guest that doesn't really fit into any of the categories mentioned above.
For the purposes of this blog I'll just refer to him as Rick, but to give you a mental image this is a picture I snapped of him while pretending to send a text.
Upon checking in Rick seemed like a pretty nice guy, so when his credit card didn't authorize I did what I could to help him out. That was the first mistake I made that night. We tried a couple of different cards as he told me that one was a line of credit that his annuity went into and earned him $90,00 dollars a year while he took out the receipts that showed the balance of his accounts. I'm definitely not an econ major so I just tuned out his money talk and didn't bother to look at the receipts, mistake number two. After a number of minutes of listening to him talk about people tampering with his finances (I assumed he was talking about the bank, but it later became apparent that was not who he was talking about) I was able to get one of the cards to go through and get him out of my face. He later apologized to me for the trouble and getting upset. I accepted and figured that was the last I would see of him. Nope.
He spent a good majority of the night out in the parking lot chain smoking and yelling to himself. The topics ranged from how he wasn't afraid of people from Idaho and their goddamn concealed weapons and he's actually well know and feared in Idaho to how people shouldn't bring their fucking dogs to hotels and back to how he earns $90,000 a year from stocks, trust funds, and annuity. (Those were originally more lengthy and are all his words, not mine) He took a break every 20 minutes or so to come refill his coffee cup. I had three separate parties come warn me about the "crazy guy" yelling at himself in the lot. No one was terribly bothered by it so I let him be, mistake number three. Once the sun was almost down he went back to his room. Shortly after I received a call from him asking me to block all incoming calls from his family or people that 'claimed' to be his family. Apparently he has a judicial order barring them from contacting him in anyway. Again, his words not mine.
At this point I was positive he had schizotypal personality disorder (simply put, mild schizophrenia) or schizophrenia. But that was no reason to treat him differently or to not rent to him especially since he wasn't bothering anyone and really kept to himself (he wouldn't say a word to anyone but me). Well I guess I should say he didn't bother anyone until 10:30 that night. A lady called me saying that there was a man who sounded very angry and agitated yelling profane things outside her door off and on all night. Her room was 30 feet from my desk so I knew this man wasn't outside her door, in fact he was below and over one room. She could hear him loud and clear and knew that he had some kind of mental illness and had most likely gone off his medication. Both of us could tell that his mood had worsened and his agitation was escalating. Her profession was family therapy and advised me to call the non-emergency police. I figured it was only a matter of time before he left his room and then who knows what would have happened. The dispatcher listened to the story, took my name, his name and info and let me know that the police were pretty familiar with this guy and sent someone out to help.
My shift was over but I stuck around mainly to see if anything was going to happen, and partly incase the police needed to talk to me. But about three minutes before the police showed up Mr Rick walks out and completely ignores mine and my co-workers hellos. He did stop right before the front door and told someone to stay on the goddamn west coast, just stay on the fucking west coast! Supposedly it's much safer here.
As I walked to my car I saw that the five police cars were not attending to Rick but a red neck couple in a dispute because apparently the girl threatened the guy by saying she was going to take him home and shoot him. I'm sure that would have help society a little bit I guess the police couldn't let it slide. As I drove away I saw Rick walk out of the bar next door, notice the police, and turn and walk the other way. When the cops got around to talking to him they pretty much just gave him a warning when we wanted them to get him out of there. Thanks Bend PD.
The next morning he came down to the desk to bitch about how all the people at Chevron wouldn't stop bothering him last night and demanded we give him a upstairs room because he did not like all the people that were peaking thru his window the previous night. He also said the only reason he smoked in the room was because he couldn't get out of his room because of all the people roaming the halls. We informed him his cards would not authorize so we could not rent him a room. We suggested he try the Super 8 which triggered a 10 minutes rant about how every one at the Super 8 is a fucking asshole, and they broke all his things and tampered with his credit card last time he stayed there. He let us know he paid good money to stay in our hotel and thought he deserved a roof over his head. My boss then informed him we would call the police again if he did not leave. He did leave but it's probably only a matter of time before he comes back.
We then called Super 8 to give them a heads up, they responded with "yeah he spent 2 days harassing our staff last week." Thanks for the warning Super 8, maybe you guys are assholes.
