If we tip a lot?

Things you probably shouldn't do at your hotel:

• Tell the night auditor you'll tip REALLY well if she reopens the bar for your group of already-intoxicated buddies.
• Look at your watch when she says the bar closes at 11, snap your fingers, and exclaim "we JUST missed it!"
• Tell your friends if the bar had been open it would have been cool, because you're a really great bartender.
• Leap drunkenly from the pillar outside like Spiderman.
• Play your guitar in the elevator.
• Make the night auditor microwave you two bags of popcorn in the back.

That's about it, really.  Yeah.  Don't do those things.  You probably shouldn't.


-Wednesday


P.S. - if you think your day sucks, just think about this guy who came in at midnight and asked me to set him a 1:00 AM wakeup call.  It'll make ya smile, because either you're still a notch above that tired, or you're a sadistic bastard.  Either way, I bet your day improves.  :)

Oh, the Drippy Sounds this Hotel Makes...

Who's got two thumbs and had to stick a bucket IN a cabinet to catch a water leak tonight?

THIS GAL!  XD

I think it rains more inside this hotel than outside!  :p


-Wednesday

Can She Do It?!

I know all of you have been wondering about whether or not I can walk down the second floor hallway with my eyes shut the whole way.

The answer to this perplexing life question is - yes I can.


Some of you may be thinking to yourselves - that's crazy.  How can she know when she reaches the end?  She'd go right through the window!

The answer to THAT perplexing life question is - that I peeked.  Really, it was more like I walked about 50% of the hallway with my eyes shut and the other half with them open.  It's cheating, I know.  But you can't judge.  Because I don't see any of YOU walking down the whole LOL Hotel hallway with your eyes closed.

I can't see anything, in fact.  Because my eyes are closed RIGHT NOW.  Now they aren't.

And that's called spell-checking.  Spell-checking with your eyes closed is just freaking stupid.


-Wednesday (who thinks she has a mild fever)

Ah...Guests. I love you. Go Away.

Weird guests are amazing in tiny, extremely small doses.  XD

We started tonight off with a couple of guys coming in from their night of drinking and stopping to look at the case of food and drinks.  One of them DEMANDS our last cookie.  He has a desperate need for the cookie.  His friend points to the muffins and says he needs a cupcake, then claims three packs of Reese's.  While that fella consumes his yearly nutritional requirement of chocolate in about two minutes, his friend, cookie-guy starts to talk to me about tattoos.  He wants me to design chocolate-fella's tattoo, which really doesn't need any designing because it's just LETTERS, but his friend finishes gobbling his food and they forget about it on their way up to their rooms.  I'm pretty glad, honestly, because I sorta have cooler stuff to draw tonight than letters.  :p

Oh, and by the way?  Every single person who has come in tonight has said good morning to me.  I know that sometimes I have a problem with saying good morning in the evenings because I just woke up, but I didn't expect it from a guest at the hotel.  And man, I really didn't expect it from EVERY guest who's come in.  Maybe it's good-morning-day, or a secret conspiracy of goodmorningdoers.  In any case, it makes me smile.  :D

One good-morninger just came in a minute ago and hollered about the brand new day and how amazing it was.  He then loudly noted that we had a new dance floor (tile) and asked me if I'd ever been out with a buncha drunk friends.


Better to be loud, drunk, and happy, than to be this fella, though:

A guy wanders in holding three packs of cigarettes in one hand.  He's scrawny and middle-aged, and while he did nod at me, he mostly stares off into space.  He doesn't look around, he doesn't wander, he just walks in a slow, mostly straight line toward the elevator and stops.  The fellow he'd followed in (I don't think they were together?) hits the elevator and takes it up.  The guy is looking at the wall.  The elevator arrives and dude is turning around every now and then, looking like he's either thinking about something very interesting, too interesting to show any expression or movement of his head, or absolutely nothing at all.  A couple of minutes later, guy gets in the elevator and rides it up.

And rides it right back down without so much as getting off of it.  I know he didn't press the 1st floor button, because it didn't ding when the doors opened on the first floor.  In fact, nothing happened when the doors opened on the first floor.  I could see half of his reflection in the elevator wall, and he was just standing there, staring out of the elevator like he hadn't noticed it opened.  The doors closed again like they do after reaching the first floor, then reopen, and guy waltzes on out.  He spaces his way right out the front door, and I haven't seen him since.

So what's your vote, guys?  Prostitute with second thoughts, drugs, both, or neither?



Like I said.  I LOVE the guests here.  They're weird, quirky, goofy, and most of the time friendly.  Small doses, though.  Very small doses.

TGIF (or maybe it's Friday's fault!)
-Wednesday

Burnt Cookies

Actually, "Burnt Cookies" is the name of a webcomic I sincerely, desperately wished I'd gotten around to.  Of all the things ADD has allowed me to start, and that I've dropped the ball on finishing, that one's the worst.  The writer was awesome and the storyline and boards rocked, I just never took anything beyond a sketch.  Saaaad.  But that's not what this is about.

Actually, I just burned a cookie.

Normally our cookies are our very bestest thing here.  They're heaven.  Scrumptious.  Today, though, when I came into work our cookies were replaced by...lumps...of things that might be called cookies...in some other dimension.

They looked like oatmeal, possibly?  I had to try one, because I needed to know what to tell people when they asked what kind of cookie they were.  Plus there were tons of them anyways.  So I tried one, but it was cold.  So I microwaved it.

30 seconds is safe, right?

Everything certainly sounded like it was safe...the microwave beeped, and I opened it, prepared to cautiously touch a potentially hot molten "cookie."


POOF!

I disappear like a magician in a cloud of smoke.  I peer up through the haze and see a smoke detector on the wall.  Crap!  I try to fan the door, but the door won't budge.  What's it stuck on?  NO TIME!  I start running maniacally back and forth through the doorway trying to fan the smoke out of the room and disperse it.  It smells like burned peanut butter and poo.

POO.

I still haven't gotten my damned cookie, having had to close the door to the microwave quickly to seal in the smoke.  I make the foolish, rookie mistake of trying to open it fast enough to grab my treat.  I NEED to see if it's a charcoal brick or not.  Call it Science.

This releases another giant puff of smoke, so I resort to breathing in deeply, running to the hallway and blowing out, lather-rinse-repeat.  In the midst of hyperventilating, I remember my cookie, make one last attempt at grabbing it and, noting that the world hasn't ended yet, retreat to the lobby to enjoy it.

Oddly enough, only the VERY CENTER of the cookie is burned.  The outsides, top, and bottom are fine, though they do NOT taste like deliciousness.  They taste like peanut butter and possibly nuts.



No fire alarms, just massive cookie-disappointment.

Fuck you, cookie.
-Wednesday



P.S. - What do you do when you have to answer the ringing phone, but you have to sneeze REALLY bad?  ...You talk in a funny voice, that's what.  -.-

Snoooowwww

It does not snow here at the LOL Hotel.  If someone were to call and ask if it snowed around here, one would say no.  No snow.

But the past few years have seen a few snow days, light as they may be.  Tonight was one such night!

For the record, if you happen to be parked at the LOL Hotel when it snows, you may very well have the snow on the hood of your car photographed next to the night auditor's goofy mug.

That same night auditor may become very embarrassed when the local newspaper delivery fellows arrives and catches her taking pictures like a tourist.  XD

So anyhoo!


This fellow comes down the elevator and is looking for the USA Todays.  Unfortunately, they and the other national newspaper weren't delivered today.  One assumes the unusual snow is to blame, so I mentioned that we could get him a local paper, but that the others didn't come due to the weather.

The fellow loses his cool, as so many people are apt to do before 8 AM.  He flings his arm toward the doors and exclaims:

"SNOW?  You call THAT snow??  That's FROST.  You have no idea what snow is (wtf?)!  I'm from Colorado where it snows A FOOT AND A HALF A NIGHT.  A little frost on the ground and you guys completely shut down!"

He didn't raise his voice much, but he continued to bitch and complain until he reached the elevator.  The woman who was ACTUALLY working (I was off shift at this point and quite irked with being chewed out while not being paid) tried to calm him by joking back about how crazy it was that locals called THIS snow, but the man wasn't having it.  He stomped back into the elevator and returned grumpily to his room, hopefully to read the damned paper online.

I like my job, otherwise my response might have been something closer to:

"Oh, pardon me, sir!  Let me call the newspaper and have them bring you one right away!  I'm sorry, I guess I shouldn't have called the paper man and told him not to bring any today.  I'm also EXTREMELY sorry that I had the WHOLE city shut down to inconvenience you - my bad."

Seriously...people without their coffee do not grasp basic concepts of blame.  XD  Like how the night auditor probably isn't at fault for a warm city's response to a few inches of snow.  A city that was 70 degrees a few days ago, and will be back in the 50s by the weekend.  I understand that people from cold climates feel quite superior (and I use "understand" loosely, pride is one thing, but I'm not sure how dealing with snow more often makes you tougher than everyone who is currently south of you), but if you're that crazy over a newspaper, maybe you should go back to your room and chug some caffeine!

Let's go!  Chop chop!  Coffee doesn't quit just because it's cold outside!


-Wednesday

Brrrrr!

So it's that big wintery storm, right?  Pretty gosh-darned cold out there.  So cold and sudden, in fact, that we had a hard freeze warning while it was still 70 degrees outside.  Now it's 20 degrees, and let me tell you...  it's cold.

Texas has no idea how to handle that much cold.  We get days like this a few times a year, but it's always a shocker and we just have trouble going from 70 to 20 in the span of a few hours.  Call it a flaw.

Of course, our lobby heater has no clue about what's going on outside.  Or maybe it does!  Every now and then, on the very coldest days, when it senses it is MOST needed, the heater will break.

Maybe not completely, or maybe it's the abundance of other heaters keeping the lobby in the 60s, but when this occurs I have no shot at achieving the typical low-seventies of your average LOL Hotel lobby environment.

It's.  20.  Degrees outside.


Normally I get around such silly heaterish mishaps by ducking into the back office area, where the heater is usually turned WAY up to compensate and I can thaw out.  Of course, today, this is not so.  It's not exactly freezing back there, but the heater won't warm up more, either.

My other trick for staying warm?  When my fingers freeze up and it hurts to type, I pop open the little, perpetually-on oven and - no lie - stick my hands inside.  It's nice.  Like sticking your head in the freezer on a hot, summer day, but in reverse.

Guess what's broken?

"ERROR

Heater Failure

Allow Oven to Cool"

-Wednesday