He waited in the lobby for her for two hours. He called her room three times, nervous when she didn't answer, and made quick trips back to his own room to check his phone there for messages when he discovered we couldn't access voicemail for any of the rooms from our consoles.

Toward the end of the two hours, he sat in a chair in the lobby, glancing at his watch. He'd given up pacing.

And then she showed up. She was at the desk, asking for him, before he noticed her, but when she turned, he was at her elbow.

She's not beautiful. He's not the most handsome man I've ever seen -- his nose is too prominent, she is mousy. The kind who sat at a table by themselves all through school, no doubt. But I saw the look on each of their faces when she turned to see him standing there, when he moved to stand beside her. They never touched each other; he reached out halfway, then stopped. They turned, and walked away, and that was the last I saw of them or will see of them, no doubt.

I'm having trouble forgetting them. I keep seeing the look that passed between them ... and remembering what it felt like when I wore it myself.

It feels like forever, tonight.

For the record, I love our Southwest crews.

Pilot: checking out of room 906. *flips card onto counter.*
C: yes, sir. you're all set, have a safe flight.
Pilot: (surprised) thanks. when does your shift end?
C: seven. couple of hours to go yet.
Pilot: gonna go home to the husband, cook him a big Sunday breakfast?
C: *chuckle* not likely. you have a good day, hmm?

I walked back into the back to fix some paperwork, he turned away. then I heard "oh, little girl... little girl, I've got some candy for you." He was standing with his crew at the desk, and he did, indeed, have a bag of candy in his hand. I laughed. "I don't think my Mommy would like that." The female co-pilot grinned. "oh, it's all right. you can trust him." He gave candy to everyone in the lobby, with the woman joking that her Mommy didn't train her right as she accepted hers. (There's a TasteTations chocolate mint candy on my dresser right now.) ;) I don't usually wonder where the guests are going when they leave us. Sometimes I'm even just glad to see them on their way. But with the Southwest crews, more than anyone else, it seems, they take some of the sunshine with them when they go. I like my job: they genuinely seem to love theirs. And it's not every airline crew. Continental and America West crews are often sullen. Northwest aren't, but they don't match the sheer joy and fun I see so often in the Southwest crews. I'm remembering all the times when Southwest have come in and stood around talking at the counter long after they've signed in, when other crews sign in and walk away, often not bothering to find out where their other crewmembers are staying before they go to their rooms. Southwest seem like family. Squabbles and all. And the ones who don't, don't come back many times.

I hope they had a safe flight.

He made a malfunction tonight.

I saw one of the officers' lips twitch, and struggled to keep a straight face myself. Sometimes, not laughing is the hardest part of my job. The man in front of us apparently didn't notice. Which, considering the fact that he'd consumed far more alcohol than Paul Bunyan should've been able to put away and still stand up straight, wasn't surprising. It's amazing how quickly one can sober up when confronted with twelve police officers in one's hotel room, I suppose.

Fifteen minutes earlier, it had been a quiet night. Then I had been called down to room 1027, with Anne saying only that it was an "emergency." We'd been talking about deaths in the hotel, and how to handle them, and how none of us had current CPR certifications, so I was more than a little frightened. I stepped off the elevator and rounded the corner at a run, to find Anne and a guest standing outside the closed door. She had her keys in hand, he had personal belongings. I saw no blood, smelled no smoke, heard nothing out of the ordinary, so I slowed down.

"I'm transferring this man to another room," Anne said when I got there. "There are two other guys in there. They were screaming and shouting and breaking things in there a minute ago, and they won't let me in to check the damage, or give me their names." "Wonderful, " I said. "That's not going to be a problem. Do you have a key to the door?" She put her keys in my hand and stepped back. I knocked on the door. "Security." There was scuffling inside, and I heard the bathroom door close, but no-one answered. I knocked again. "Security." Still no answer. I love these kinds of moments. I shrugged at Anne, who looked worried, and then I stepped back just far enough to be in view from the eyehole. "You gentlemen have a choice. You can either open the door now and let me assess the damage, or I can go downstairs, call the police, and let them handle it. Which would you prefer?"

( The door opened. )

The ways people react to it shouldn't surprise me anymore. Sure, there are two main camps -- roughly, "submissive" and "defiant" -- but the variation within them are sometimes startling. On the one hand, you get the people who react like you've prodded them with hot tongs whenever they see you. And then you get... the Others.

I got a taste of each last night.

The night starts off with an "awareness round." It's the first patrol of the night, just after I've been briefed, when I go check all the doors, let the staff know who's on duty and that I've got the Nextel on. It's usually when I figure out pretty concretely what the tone of the night is and why the previous guard looked so worried. I generally end the patrol with the bar, because if there's a problem, the bar is usually where it is. And if I'm going to get stuck there, I want to not worry about what else hasn't been checked yet. Besides, with the ballrooms directly above, the bar is a good vantage point. The ballrooms are the other hot spot anyway.

Well, last night I walked into the bar and took my usual spot, standing just inside the doorway. The crowd was subdued for a Friday night, but I couldn't figure out why for a couple of minutes. (Trust me, with our usual Friday nights, one doesn't look that sort of gift horse in the mouth.) However, after a minute or two...

"Excuse me, officer. Are we doing something wrong?"

I looked over -- the question's coming from a worried-looking man standing near a corner table. Built like a brick wall, he's got to be seven feet if he's an inch. But the expression on his face is "little boy about to be taken behind the woodshed." I smiled. "No, sir. I'm just observing. Killing a few minutes at the end of my patrol." He didn't buy it. Instead, he got more assertive. "Well, I mean, you've been standing here watching everything. Why are you here if we're not doing anything wrong?" Erm, maybe because it's my job. "Because it's as good a place as any to end my patrol, sir." "Well, I'd appreciate it if you'd go somewhere else. I'm a paying guest, I pay my tab, and I don't pay to have someone standing over me." He's raising his voice by this point, and I'm beginning to wonder exactly what it is he is so worried about. About thirty seconds later, I find out. Because three young-looking girls appear from the back and occupy the table. He's been buying them drinks -- turns out, only one of them is twenty-one. I called the Raleigh P.D. End of story for me, as all four are escorted off the premises.

And then.

And then.

Among our other guests, is a Gay Bowling Team named -- and I swear to God I could NOT make this up if I tried -- the Grab Its.

They were good guests, for the most part. I wasn't completely happy with the way they were treated, but I'm not exactly customer service -- I am a customer liaison simply because I'm among them so often, but I'm not Guest Services. We had two noise complaints regarding them, nothing out of the ordinary for a high-spirited group of guys. I was largely ignoring them. Until I did my second patrol, and on the door of 1523 there's a note. There's a Do Not Disturb sign, of course, and frankly, it's one of those things which make me truly thankful to our airline crews. They come in, go to bed, put up the Do Not Disturbs, and sleep like the dead until 5:30 AM. So whenever I see one of the signs, I mentally write it off as "airline crew wanting to sleep," and go no further. Saves my peace of mind. Really, it does. But anyway. I look at the note: it's addressed to security, states that he's noticed I do patrols of the floors, and asks that he be "given" about thirty minutes, because he's "in with someone."

Eww. Euww. EUWW!

Here's how it goes, kids. The uniform doesn't make me your mother confessor. Straight, bi, try, I don't care. I don't wanna know. I won't knock on your door unless you send for me or you're disturbing your neighbours.

I removed the note, shook my head, and walked away. Just another night at the hotel. Wonder what they've got in store for me tomorrow.

ZorbaTHut (1:53:02 AM): heh. neat.
ZorbaTHut (1:53:05 AM): that sounds interesting. :-)
Mistress Eleri (1:53:55 AM): no, dear. stumbling in on the two who were having sex in the elevator was interesting. last night was just scary.
ZorbaTHut (1:54:07 AM): *laughs*
Mistress Eleri (1:54:24 AM): ... and the bat -was- prettier.
ZorbaTHut (1:54:26 AM): you know, you'd think that they wouldn't risk elevator sex. I mean, those elevators are *used*, and are controllable from the outside :P
Mistress Eleri (1:54:54 AM): they apparently figured the service elevators weren't used that much. :P
ZorbaTHut (1:55:01 AM): ah. heh.
Mistress Eleri (1:55:18 AM): they were -wrong.- dear gods, were they wrong.
ZorbaTHut (1:56:03 AM): heheheh
Mistress Eleri (1:56:49 AM): *shakes her head.*
ZorbaTHut (1:57:42 AM): so what do you *do* in that situation? :P
Mistress Eleri (1:58:25 AM): I try to keep a straight face while I point out that this is inappropriate and it's now going to have to be logged.
Mistress Eleri (1:58:54 AM): then I go back to the front desk and laugh my ass off while I'm writing up an incident report.
ZorbaTHut (1:58:58 AM): nice :D
Mistress Eleri (2:00:03 AM): as I understood the rush of explanations, they were each there with their spouses. so they couldn't go back to -either- of their rooms.
Mistress Eleri (2:00:17 AM): I didn't feel sorry for them somehow.
ZorbaTHut (2:00:51 AM): *snrk*
ZorbaTHut (2:00:54 AM): that doesn't help, folks :P
Mistress Eleri (2:00:55 AM): btw, that's a "church group" story. :P
ZorbaTHut (2:02:07 AM): oh dear. that doesn't help either.
Mistress Eleri (2:02:09 AM): they were there to hear a preacher. then they snuck off after the sermon and the singing... to go commit adultery.
Mistress Eleri (2:02:34 AM): in -my- elevator.
ZorbaTHut (2:02:36 AM): "It's not really a *deadly* sin, is it? I mean . . . it's more of an *affirmation of life*, right? Anyway, the commandments aren't *absolutes*."
Mistress Eleri (2:02:43 AM): *grin.*

From the street, my jobsite looks unassuming. From the front door, or just inside the lobby, it looks sturdy. Sheltering. The building is only thirty years old, but it looks as though it has seen it all for centuries, and been shaken by nothing. Sometimes I think that the architect must have had a very twisted sense of humour. Or perhaps he'd just worked in hotels for awhile.

I've learned to stop and gauge the night by the look on Bernette's face just before and just after she sees me standing there. Professional/relieved is a bad combination. It generally means "wedding party on the floor." Or, worse, "church group on the floor." But that's a story for another time. Tonight it was a wedding party. The fact that Bernette couldn't wait to leave should've told me something. But I am dense, and optimistic when I know there is no escape. The hotel may cure me of that yet.

Forty-five minutes into my shift, a call on the Nextel. I answer, expecting a noise complaint - the hotel is, for the first time in my (limited) experience, at full capacity. We've had to "walk" an airline crew -- find them rooms, at hotel expense, in another hotel. I am finished with my first round of the building, so I'm not too worried when I answer the call. And Donna proceeds to say something that blows my calm straight to hell. There's a bat in 825. Would you go remove it? I almost dropped the Nextel. Don't we have someone for this? I'm trying not to yell at her. We sure do, the answer comes back. Security. Fuck. I was afraid she'd say that. I haggled with her for a little bit, but in the end, it was either I went and removed the bat, or they'd call in the pest control people, the ones who take care of rats and snakes and the like... who would kill it. I have a feeling dewhitton would never have forgiven me if I'd let that happen. So off I trot to the eighth floor.

I was lucky. The guests, though they were huddled against the far wall, weren't the hysterical type. I was dreading opening the door and having a frantic, angry bat divebombing me or something of the sort. Instead, the bat was calmly hanging upside down from the curtain, apparently paying no attention to the humans it was terrorising. Gathered in the way it was, it was maybe the size of my palm. Not, of course, that I was about to stop and measure it. It was a light brown colour -- that generic wood colour that cheap student violins come in, if that helps. Not rich enough to be maple, not yellow enough to be pine. I was expecting anything from chocolate to black, for some reason. I grabbed a towel, had one of the girls get a bag... and then threw the towel over the bat, wrapped it up, and popped it, towel and all, into the bag. Whereupon the thing began to make noise. A lot of noise. (Whatever happened to bats making sounds that were outside the human range of hearing?) It chittered... lots of sharp, short, high-pitched squeaks. And growls. Let's not forget the growls. I kept my eye on that mouthful of teeth, and took it through the back way, outside. When I unwrapped it, it took maybe three full seconds, gave a last squeak and a short hop off the towel, and then I grabbed the towel and bag and didn't stop to say goodbye.

Believe it or not, that was the smoothest part of the night. I got back inside just in time to greet two women who were coming into the hotel, complaining heatedly about a group of "punks" outside who were making obscene gestures. Turns out, the groom and the rest of his bachelor party attendees had had far too much to drink. He was half-dressed at best, and his friends were attempting to get him back to his room. I sped them on their way a little. Perhaps that was my mistake.

Not twenty minutes later, another call on the Nextel. Donna sounds positively choked, but she only asks me to check out a disturbance on the 16th floor. So, what can I do? I head up there. Step off of the elevator to see that group of guys again, gathered in a little cluster. I look at them, they part... and there's the groom. Oh, dear gods, there's the GROOM! Wearing nothing but the smile I hope his bride still will be wearing when his friends fill him in on this later today. Suffice it to say, I escorted him back to his room -- and wished, while I was at it, that I could lock him in.

It's amazing, to me. Children are dreaded visitors in a hotel. They find the service elevators, get into the laundry and kitchen, press every button on the guest elevators, make noise, and congregate on the stairwells. But they're still angels compared to supposedly-grown men with too much liquor in them. The children were never so shock-inducing. And the bat was prettier.

So... yeah. I'm security at Bedlam, two nights a week. It's either going to break me or drive me to sanity. But while it's making up its mind as to which way it wants to push me, you all get to hear about it. Aren't you lucky. ;)