ACCOUNTANT BY DAY

There is this incredibly loud family that just checked in tonight and they have a bunch of kids and are staying in all the rooms immediately surrounding me - both sides and across the hall. There are two screaming babies and then kids that are shouting and running around and then the adults are talking really loudly. They keep going in and out of each other’s rooms and slamming the door. Yesterday it was very convenient being by the elevator. Now I regret the room they gave me. I tried going to sleep but couldn’t because these people are actually really loud. You would think they might be tired if they traveled to get here and they would just want to get all these kids to sleep and get them to stop running all over the place at night. If I had kids I would be really concerned about whether they bothered other guests late at night.

So I called the front desk and asked the night clerk if they could send someone up to ask these people to be quiet. He acted like that was the weirdest thing anyone had ever asked him to do. He said, “Uh…I guess I can TRY to do something, buut…” and trailed off. He made the “dot dot dot” part really obvious, as if to imply that I was making a terribly outrageous request and that to do what I asked would be going far above and beyond the normal call of duty. Then there was this long pause, because I didn’t know what to say to that. The only other time I’ve actually gotten annoyed enough to call the desk over loud people late at night, the hotel clerk said, “We’ll take care of it right away, thank you,” and that was that. I was thinking about saying something like, “Thank you, I’d appreciate that since it’s getting rather late now,” but before I did that he said, “Okaayyy…bye…”, which I guess was his way of telling me to hang up and stop bothering him. I didn’t get the impression he was going to do anything about it.

I’m going to consult my coworker friend tomorrow to see if I am being unreasonable. It’s 11:00 at night where I am, so to me on a weeknight it is reasonable for hotel guests to expect that business travelers might be staying in the hotel and that they might have to get up early the next morning and might not care to be kept awake by loud conversations and running, shouting kids. Last night I would have given this hotel high ratings on service based on the ladies working the front desk yesterday evening. They actually called me in my room to see if it was all right, which no hotel has done for me before. Maybe the good employees aren’t able to work the night shift.

Something tells me I’ll be up for a while.