going in to work at a hotel that's closed for a month has been delightfully boring..

Normally I have to wear black slacks with my red Comfort Inn polo shirt (jersey, whatever you wanna call it). Right now I'm wearing blue jeans and a long sleeve tan button up shirt.

When I work mornings, when we're open, it's a busy, hectic time for the first two or three hours. I come in at 7am, and the housekeepers arrive around 8am. I have an hour to get the housekeeping lists together. That entails assigning side work (vacuuming each floor, the stairs, cleaning the elevator, soda, candy and ice machines) and checking off on the HK lists the rooms that have checked out so HK knows what rooms they can start with. The night person creates the HK lists and is supposed to put a check mark next to the rooms they've check out, but they never do. I also have to check each arriving reservation for special requests, such as rollaways, requests for a particular floor, cribs. I need to do all this before HK arrives. And I have to make sure the night person didn't forget to put rooms on the list. It's a major fiasco to check someone into a room, only to have them come back to the desk because the room never got cleaned. If we're full up then that means I have to call HK in to clean the room.

While I'm trying to do this I'm also checking people out, answering the phone, giving people directions to the highway and answering various stupid (and sometimes not-so-stupid) questions. And we don't have a separate # for faxes. So I get a lot of calls in the am that I have to forward over to the fax machine. I also get a lot of calls from rooms that go something like "our toilet is plugged, can you send someone up to fix it?" There is no "someone" other than myself. So I have to run up to take care of it. I AM the plunger master.

There's also a safe in each room. At check-in it says right on the registration that guests will be charged $1.50 a night for the safe, but if they don't use it we can remove the fee for them. I hate that crap. Guests do too. Checking people out in the morning I get a lot of, "what's with this safe fee? I didn't use any safe. I didn't even know there was one." Normally I don't say anything other than "well then, I'll just take that back off there for ya." but if they get really snotty with me I'll pull their registration and point out where they initialled that they knew there was a safe in the room... blah blah. Get all up in their grill.

Since we've closed, I come in, run the night audit software on the computer, plug in my laptop, fire up AOL Radio, plop down in a chair and promptly go to sleep. And when I say sleep, I'm talking the sleep of babies. No guests are gonna come up to the front desk and catch me nappin'. The other night I had maybe 4 phone calls. 2 of them were faxes. I slept all freakin' evening. (I work a couple morning shifts and 3 evening shifts)

This morning it was my intention to bring to work the manual for my new camera, but I clean forgot. There's a ton of features on this thing that I don't understand.

I've also been wanting to try my hand at fiction. I have a really cool book on writing really short stories. It contains a boatload of writing prompts. I should be bringing that in as well.

Now that I'm finished writing this I think I'm gonna step outside for a smoke. Then I'll come back in, surf multiply for a little bit. Maybe grab a hard boiled egg out of the kitchen. Then take the first of my many catnaps.