Double Your Pleasure

I've been invited by a good friend to participate in another blog over at Cultured Insolence. I don't think it's going to feature the same type of material I usually put up here, but since Chris is the funniest bald man I know, I think you'll quite enjoy it. See you there (not really, of course).

Shining A Turd

Working at a fancy-schmancy hotel in December offers me the somewhat unexpected fringe benefit of observing blue-collar workers at their absolute finest. When companies have their Christmas parties, they generally provide all the free liquor their employees can handle. Drunk factory workers and a four star hotel normally don't combine very well, but if you're at all curious about how mouth-breathers behave when they're in a hotel in which they couldn't hope to set foot under normal circumstances, working as a bellman at such a hotel during the holiday season should definitely be on your "bucket list."

Two nights ago, we hosted one such Christmas party. One gentlemen assumed that because I and my fellow bellmen were opening the door for him, we were somehow "his kind of people," and that we normally don't get an opportunity to converse with our regular "buttoned down" guests in the language of the great unwashed. He walked around the hotel drinking two Newcastles at once (one in each hand, sipping alternately from both), and talking loudly about his coworkers and fellow guests. When another guest walked into the hotel wearing a headband, Mr Two Newcastles said without reservation, "If I had that on my head, I'd feel like sucking a c***!" I laughed out loud, which unfortunately encouraged him. He kept talking to me like we were somehow friends. Just because I don't wear a tie to work, it doesn't mean I consider myself a member of the WWE-watching class. Actually, I've always just sort of assumed I was a member of the bourgeoisie...

During another company Christmas party, when we were valeting cars, we had a gentleman yell to us from the veranda to make sure we didn't lock his car when we parked it. Naturally, I said "Of course" to him as though I actually cared about his POS Chevy truck. Unfortunately, I wasn't the one who ended up parking his car, and whoever did locked the doors. When it came time for everyone to leave, I was the bellman who got stuck pulling that particular truck. When I tried to open the door, I finally realized why he'd been so adamant about his doors remaining unlocked: this dipstick didn't have door keys to his own car. We actually had to call a locksmith, who charged us a hundred dollars to open the doors.

If the guest whose doors we locked is reading this, I'd like to take this opportunity to speak to directly to you, if I may: You are an imbecile. The sole reason for your existence is to provide comic relief to everyone with an IQ higher than that of a poached egg. If you stopped for half a second to think about why valets at a four star hotel would hesitate to leave a guest's car unlocked, you might realize that you should have offered an explanation for your stupid-ass request. If anything got stolen from your junk-heap of an automobile, we would have been legally responsible for it. Did you ever think about that, you dumb schmuck? No, I don't think you would have. You're the type of man who drops his pants to the floor when you're peeing at a public urinal. I'm sure your GED test prep instructor is mighty proud that you finally developed the ability to sleep for eight hours straight without drowning in a tepid pool of your own saliva. People like you should be chemically castrated and forced to perform brainless, unimportant tasks, like teaching at a public school, or working at Best Buy.

Actually, I'm grateful I've been exposed to the wide variety of guests who stay at the hotel. Some of them are actually quite pleasant. The vast majority are not. It's the latter group that constantly provides me with new material, and I couldn't thank them enough for that.

If I Were A Naked Woman, Where Would I Be?

Not too long ago, I was in the middle of an eight-hour shift at the hotel where I work, and the front desk got a call from one of the guests saying they couldn't figure out how to use the jacuzzi tub. That's not an unusual complaint, as it appears most people really are too stupid to get water from a faucet. I walked down the hall, wondering to myself (out loud- whenever I'm angry or stressed I talk to myself) if they simply hadn't found the big white button that activates the jets, or perhaps they never tried rotating the nob to get hotter water. It always amazes me how simple the solution to a guest's problem usually is.

Anyway, I got to the guest's door, and I knocked and announced myself ("Bell Service! Can I shine ya shoes, Massa?"). It took the guy about forty seconds to answer the door, so I assumed he had been naked and was putting on a robe or something. When he opened the door, I instantly remembered which guest it was. I'd checked him and his wife into the hotel earlier that day. I remembered him so easily because he had a wicked lateral lisp. I love people with lateral lisps. It's funny to me that they seem not to realize that they sound like partially-unconscious Down syndrome burn victims. He let me into the room, and being the nosey jerk I am, I couldn't help but look around the room to see where his wife was. When you've been a bellman for decades like I have, you naturally develop an uncontrollable urge to look in on the private lives of your guests whenever you enter their rooms. Maybe it's because most people don't clean themselves up AT ALL to answer the door for a bellman. I think they think we're not really humans, but rather some sort of hyper-realistic androids. The fact that I actively avoid eye contact may contribute to that assumption.

After I showed him that blue means "cold" and red means "hot," he thanked me profusely for my superhuman problem solving skills, and he offered to kiss my feet. Having just polished my shoes, I politely declined. As I left the room, assuming I'd simply missed his wife during my admittedly cursory inspection of the room, I looked around for her again. Still nothin'. I walked out of the room, and as soon as he shut the door, I heard his voice, followed immediately by his wife's. Confused, I wondered where the heck she could have been. Then I realized she was probably in the closet. I have a fairly active imagination, so I kept thinking about what had just happened, trying to figure out why she'd been hiding. Then, in a cringe-inducing moment of clarity, I realized exactly what had been going on. When I knocked on the door, I had interrupted some sort of... I don't even want to write it.

I threw up in a potted plant. Don't tell my boss.