Work Stories: Motel Manager (Pt. 1)

***Over my last few posts where I've shared my experiences, more than a few users have asked me to redo my work stories. I made them over a year ago, and frankly I wasn't quite as good at making posts then as I am now. I will warn you that I'm going to write these in full scenarios, so it's going to be quite long as you guys (and girls) haven't seemed to mind when I make long posts. So strap in and welcome to my life.**

I've been working at this motel for for over 4 years, I've been a manager here for 3 of those years. I've seen all sorts of crazy shit in that time, some of which I've shared on Imgur in previous posts. The job doesn't pay particularly well, but these experiences have been unforgettable, and honestly I can't say I'm regretting many things. Once I finish my degree, I will have to leave and pursue higher employment - these damned loans ain't gonna pay themselves.

Our hotel offers 3 rates, daily rate, weekly rate, and monthly rate. Not a lot of motels offer monthly rates and for good reason. The simple fact of the matter is that once you've stayed at a hotel or motel for 30 days or more, you are considered a resident, not a guest. This means that monthly customers fall under the same legal protection of tenants - including eviction if you don't pay, which can drag out for months and a ton of legal fees. If I could change one single thing about this job, I would change that - but the owners are adamant that they want it that way, so I just have to grit through it.

I was hired on very last minute, the owner had pneumonia, and her husband was catching it too. So when I started, I was pretty much left to my own devices and interpretation for how to do things. There was no training, there was no introductions with other staff and the tenants. I even had to google how to use a credit card terminal because I simply had no experience with it. Up until this point, the owner was running the office by herself, she had no other desk clerks. We had housekeepers, but that was about it. I was desperate, they were desperate, it worked out in the end.

I had never worked in the hospitality industry, I had never even stayed at a hotel! I was just thrust into the world of it with no clue. Needless to say, I did a lot of googling that week. The owner and her husband leaves to go to their doctor's office, I was told not to expect them back for a week. "So... I guess this is gonna be a little bit more than a shift." I didn't mind the long hours, I was even told that I can sleep in the office if I really need to. As I said, this was a desperate situation for both of us, I wasn't about to say no to a job. The first three days pass pretty uneventfully, I've gotten a handle on most of the concepts, I've met the housekeeping staff, done checkouts, and filled out duty rosters and time cards. And then the fourth day came...

We had this guy staying here when I started for the purposes of this, I'll call him Victor. Victor is old, Victor is an asshole, Victor is a pain in the ass to everyone within shouting distance. Well, Victor is a monthly and he's been staying here for a few years at this point. He comes in, assumedly to berate the small Asian lady who normally works the desk. Instead he is greeted by a 6'3" guy looking all panicky and confused.

"Who are you?" he demanded.
"Andrew."
"Where's the chinky lady?"
"She has pneumonia, she' went to the hospital. She might be gone a few days. Is there something I can help you with?"
"Bullshit!"
"Excuse me?"
"Can't pull one over on me, Mr. Reagan."
"What?!"

And he stormed off, as fast as sheer hate and malice could propel him. I just dismissed it, just hoping he was some random person who I'd never have to see - I didn't even know he lived here at the time, so I was in for a rude awakening, and I don't even look vaguely like fucking Reagan.

A few hours pass and suddenly I hear a car pull into the carport. It's the police. Two officers get out, four more officers walk in from the sides. Main officer has his gun drawn and yells for me to come out of the office (the back of the office is enclosed, it's not just a reception desk) I put my hands in the air and walk through the door into the lobby. I'm shaking at this point, 100% certain I'm going to catch a bullet with my face.

But no, here comes fucking Victor, pushing past the officers with their guns drawn.

"You fucking killed them!" he was hamming it up, in a very overly dramatic way. "You fucking killed them, and now you took their business."

Two officers pull him aside and then two officers pull me outside, frisk me, and then start to ask me questions. Apparently, Victor had called the police and told them that I had killed my boss and her husband. Furthermore, I was impersonating them so I can steal all the money from the business - we had maybe 8 customers at this point since the owner had left, it's practically an empty parking lot. As a final addition to the tale, Victor informed the dispatcher that I was heavily armed and threatening him.

They seem to catch on that they've been played pretty quickly. Victor is arrested and given a psych eval. He came back after a week, apparently without charges. I was given a half-hearted apology by the officer (it was unsolicited, at least) I don't blame him for pulling a gun on me, but fuck was it scary.

This one took place after I was already a manager for about a week To fill out the interim in the last story real quick, I was apparently good enough to exceed the owner's expectations and I was kept on full-time. She hired other desk clerks and pretty much left the hands-on role she had before I was here. I was promoted to manager just a few days before they decided to visit their relatives in China for 3 weeks.

We had 3 desk clerks. I covered midday (because checkouts and housekeeping are the most difficult part of the day), another covered afternoons, and a third covered nights/early mornings, the fourth was meant to be a shiftbreaker. When the shiftbreaker guy found out that he was going to be working 2 shifts back-to-back, he freaked the fuck out and started to throw a fit.

"I have to work 10 hours straight?!?"
"I told you this last week, if you'd prefer I can switch one of my shifts with you."
"Oh yeah, so you can get the easy night shift and I'd get the shitty day shift." At this point, I realized that he had agreed to be a shiftbreaker without knowing what the shiftbreaker is, he also didn't finish reading the schedule before he decided to voice his issues with it, because he should have noticed that he had a dayshift near the end of the week anyway.

In case it isn't common knowledge, a shiftbreaker works odd hours during a standard schedule, the purpose of a shiftbreaker is to limit the amount of overtime paid out. For example, by preventing the employees from working 7 days in a row or beyond 8 hours in a shift as much as possible. They were all going to get a bit of overtime as it was, but this just prevented double-overtime. In retrospect, we needed another employee, it would've saved everything, and I was on salary as-is, but I was already taking well over 50 hours.

And then he saw it, the dayshift he had at the end of the week. "Fuck this" he threw his nametag on the counter and stormed out the door. So, that made it a bit harder for me. I joked around "Well, we got more overtime if you guys want it." They had an awkward laugh. I was fully expecting to have to take over the totality of his shifts at this point. But... it got worse.

After about an hour of my shift, the afternoon shift guy calls in. He's feeling sick, and I know he's full of shit. I just tell him to show up the next day with a doctor's note or I'd have to pursue disciplinary action, not much else I could do in that situation So I stay there, I work through my shift, I work through the afternoon shift, and I'm ready to fall over. Night shift is supposed to show up in 15 minutes.

He doesn't show up. This goes on, calls are not returned, voicemail is disabled, call from my cell phone - number is not in service, call from our fax line, call goes through. So... he blocked my cell number. "Dick move, bro..." So it's pretty obvious now that I'm the only one here... for the next 3 fucking weeks. It was hell, I had to sleep under the desk - and worse yet, pretend that I wasn't just sleeping under a desk when a customer would walk in.

Note that this wasn't during the slow season, this was mid-spring - our busiest season. We were at or near capacity nearly every night. You'd be amazed at how inefficient a "No Vacancy" sign is at warning away people too, it's really amazing. They just seem to think you're lying or call back with slightly different voices. The truly scary thing about this is that I'm nearly 100% sure that I was hallucinating at some point near the end of those three weeks and I'm not 100% sure of what was real or not, particularly when customers would come in and ask for a room when we were full. It was some special kind of hell.

Story does have a happy ending though. I was given the paychecks that was supposed to be for the other guys, I did not get the full overtime though - quite literally the overtime she would have owed would have been nearly all of the money I brought in. She did give me a $400 Amazon gift card that someone got her for her birthday and I got a week off to rest and recuperate. When I returned, I was given complete control over hiring so I could build my own team with autonomy.

This one was the one thing I do feel bad about. I do not service monthly rooms, that is done exclusively through the owner. She's the one that signs rental agreements with tenants, she vets them, she interfaces with them, I have repeatedly refused to deal with them. Does that make me a bad manager? Probably, but frankly I won't be liable for when the issues with monthies arise - such as this one, so by my insistence I am to be held as a blameless party in the rental agreements in legal matters. Everything is strictly between the owner and the tenant.

Meet Steve. Steve is a drunk, and Steve is kind of an asshole. Steve likes to run the heater in his room with the door wide open. We have really powerful heaters and air-conditioner units for each room, they are these giant monster 220v wall units. They are each meant for a room twice the size of the room they actually occupy. It's overkill, of course that doesn't work if you leave your front door wide open while cranking the heat.

Well, Steve did that... Obviously the room isn't going to get warm. All that will happen is that the motor and heating elements will overheat and the safety thermostat will cut the power to both for a few hours to let them cool off. Well, Steve doesn't like that. Safety? Who the fuck needs Safety? So he took apart the wiring for the heating unit and bypassed the safety feature. So his heater ran for days, it ran so hard that is burnt out on December 23rd of last year. The owner and her husband inspected it, and it was very obviously tampered with. They refused to replace it and they went on vacation.

Now is the part where I am conflicted, and one of the primary reason I hate that we allow monthlies. By law, the landlord is required to provide certain amenities - water, heat, and cooling (by our local renter's law) My boss obviously didn't do that, but for very logical reasons - after all, bypassing the safety features on an electric heater is a HUGE fire risk and very illegal in its own right. However, he's still entitled to heat - I was also expressly forbade from moving him into another room, which I couldn't do anyway because his deal is with the owner, not me. Well, he didn't like that - I didn't even like saying it, I was basically telling someone they were going to be cold on Christmas, I was a fucking Christmas monster!

And then insults, berating comments, and profanity started out of his mouth and didn't stop until the 26th. I was working all the shifts (again to avoid overtime and making my clerks work on Christmas) The simple fact of the matter is that there are forms of legal recourse he can take against my boss, I even told him what they were even though it's a blatant conflict of interest for me to even say them.

He could withhold his rent, he could order repairs himself and then bill her, or he could sue her outright - but insulting me, berating me, and harassing me was not helpful. I'm actually pretty satisfied that I managed to get through the situation without yelling or going all Elin Woods on his face.Still, it leaves a bad taste in my mouth even though I'm on the legally justified side of the situation.

We're slow in late-Fall. It's REALLY slow, perhaps maybe 3 or 4 customers a day on a good day. These times of the year, we have to cut back staff, I tend to take a ton more office shifts - but it's easy, pretty relaxing work. In fact, it's so quiet that I've brought my PS4 to work more than a few times. (I never said this job didn't have some perks...) When business is slow, that means the WiFi is generally unburdened, so it's actually really good - even though it's suddenly complete shit once we get a few more guests.

Generally I can dick around on my phone, browse imgur, do my college work, watch some netflix or youtube, or even sleep. I've taken some naps under the desk by choice these days :) Sometimes we can go 3 or 4 days without a single customer, the whole town is just ghosted out. Even played full-length games of Monopoly with the housekeeper without being interrupted by even the monthlies.

Sometimes I almost feel guilty cashing my checks during the slow season... almost

Seriously, this is horrible. Now I know I said right there "more dead bodies than I care to remember" Well I do remember, the number is 9. I've seen 9 dead bodies in this motel in 4 years. Three suicides, one murder, and five by natural causes as far as I know. This is probably the most emotionally jarring thing about working here. We've had more than average deaths by natural causes specifically because we allow monthlies. Turns out, I've learned, that paying a motel by-the-month with housekeeping for your parents is cheaper than putting them in an assisted living home. So terrible, terrible, fucked up middle-aged fuckwits send their parents to some skeevy motel to die. (Not meaning to talk shit on where I work, but it is a discount motel and it kinda looks like it)

Sometimes I'll notice that I haven't seen an old guy in a while and I'll go knock on his door. No response, so now I need to do a welfare check. (I try to have someone with me when I do it, for legal reasons) and then they're lying there, dead. First time it happened I gave CPR to a guy who had been dead for over 10 hours - so that was gross.

The suicides we've had have all been self-inflicted gunshots, that's not something you can easily get out of your head. When I've shared my previous stories on Imgur, I've gotten similar stories from other people in the industry and it seems like it happens pretty much everywhere, it's just not something most people talk about.

In the case of the murder, I discovered the body and notified the police (it was at least a few days old, they'd broken into a rarely used storage room) I was briefly considered a suspect, and I can't imagine that looks good on my police record... but thankfully I had my browser history on my laptop that showed I was on Imgur for literally all day. So thank you Imgur, for that.

***TL:DR Motels, dude... they're a thing and I work at one.***

***Thanks if you've made it this far. You're a beautiful person!***