You should know this one!

[Broomjockey]

We've got a massive convention staying at my place of work now, and a number of the people are leaving on Sunday. That means that a number of people are asking for a late check out time. Some people want 3pm. I try not to laugh at them as I inform them that would be another night's charge, since we wouldn't be able to turn the room over, since the cleaning staff wouldn't be able to get to the room.

Some people want a noon checkout time, and I'm more than happy to accomodate that.

Then there's the people this post is about. The ones who have no clue what checkout time is. Despite the fact that every single one of them had to sign a form that the first line is "Check out time is 11:00 am." And it's not a case of they just forgot. They genuinely didn't know. There's some bloody important information on that sheet besides when check-out is. There's also where the smoking area is, and the $110 charge for lost keys. With 200+ check-ins in the past 2 days, we had no time to tell each person the information, so we just point on the form and say "Read this, make sure your check out date is correct, then sign here." You know how many people sign in less than 2 seconds from being handed a pen?

...

...

If you said most of them, you're right.

I just really wanna tell them "That information was on the registration card you signed. You should already know. Next person please!"

Bonus story: I feel bad for the people in one room. Their smoke detector went nuts. I'm fairly certain it was because of the massive amounts of Tag body spray they used, but our smoke detectors are overly sensitive anyways. So I went up to try and see what I could do.

This one brainiac from down the hall comes down to "assist." First they said "Why don't you guys call the front desk for help?" I wave and say "Hi, how're you?" (I wear a shirt that plainly says where I work). Then when we say that we don't know what's wrong with it, she comes up with the genius idea that "It probably just needs a new battery."

I tell her that's a great idea, except they're plugged into the mains for the building, since they're all tied into the fire control system (not to mention, that with 13 floors, and 40+ rooms a floor, that's a massive number of batteries, and we can't trust students to replace them during the year, so I really doubt we'd go with that no matter what). She looked suitably abashed then, and left.

[Broomjockey]

Update!

Wow, looks like the ones asking when check-out time was were the smart ones.

We had probably about 50 people try to check out at 3:00pm or later, and protest when we added an extra day's charge. The ones who tried to check out at 6:00pm and got uppity were especially funny.

[Pedersen]

This one brainiac from down the hall comes down to "assist." First they said "Why don't you guys call the front desk for help?" I wave and say "Hi, how're you?" (I wear a shirt that plainly says where I work). Then when we say that we don't know what's wrong with it, she comes up with the genius idea that "It probably just needs a new battery."

Single most common cause of failure for smoke detectors that Dyslexic Schizophrenics installed: Spiders. Second most common: Dust.

You see, those detectors worked by having what amounts to a small open air capsule in the center of it with a light shining through it. If smoke gets in, it settles into the capsule, breaks the light beam, and trips the detector.

Since the capsule is open, dust settling in would eventually trip it. Spiders settling in and building webs would trip it.

The fix was to blow it out using compressed air.

Dunno if it will help you in future, but it saved us a few times. And customers really liked not having to pay for a tech to come out and clean up some dust for them.

[Akasa]

6PM?!
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

[Broomjockey]

Dunno if it will help you in future, but it saved us a few times. And customers really liked not having to pay for a tech to come out and clean up some dust for them.

Huh. That could be useful. I have access to some compressed air, so it's worth a shot at least.

[bainsidhe]

I know this is a little off-topic, but we once were staying in a hotel and housekeeping started coming in to clean the room...at 7am. Yes, while we were sleeping. I don't know if they misread who had already checked out, since we were scheduled to leave by 11am. But come ON, 7am is not an hour I enjoy being awake. I have to for work of course, but vacation is MY time, thank you.

And you have a convention with check-in/check-out times at a student dorm? Are you even equipped to deal with that mess

[Imprl59]

Yikes! Please don't use pressurized air around smoke detectors unless you know which type you have. The more common ionization type detector can dangerous if you disturb the radioactive component,

From the how stuff works website:
"Alpha radiation cannot penetrate a sheet of paper, and it is blocked by several centimeters of air. The americium in the smoke detector could only pose a danger if you were to inhale it. Therefore, you do not want to be playing with the americium in a smoke detector, poking at it, or disturbing it in any way, because you don't want it to become airborne."

Steve B.

[Broomjockey]

And you have a convention with check-in/check-out times at a student dorm? Are you even equipped to deal with that mess

No.

They like to think we are, but we're really not.

Due to being a secure student facility during the school year, it's a pain to explain to people our security procedures. The only enterance doors are locked at 8pm. There's only one stairwell that you can use from the ground floor without setting off alarms. You need a card seperate from your room key to unlock the front doors after hours, to access the elevator enclosures, and use the elevator.

Also, the cleaning staff, quite frankly, sucks. They have plenty of warning of large groups comings and goings, but don't schedule staff to be able to handle the increased number of rooms. In fact, we probably won't be recovered from this convention until a couple days before student move-in. Our room tracking system is shite, since one poor soul I tried to check him into his room in our system, and I was informed it was dirty. I pulled up a list of supposedly clean rooms, and after sending him to *two* seperate rooms, finally my boss grabbed a fistful of keys and started checking himself, since I couldn't leave the desk. We ended up upgrading the guest and comping his first night. And he wasn't the only one to need to be shuffled to a new room.

It's almost impossible though to tell if it's the cleaning staff lying about having cleaned it, or if it's a co-worker's mistake in marking a room as clean when it wasn't, or shuffling someone in there without doing it properly.

Also, our reservations system is horrible. You can't make a room searchable by two people staying in it (as we usually try and do 2 people/bedroom), so if someone's looking for someone they know, but that person wasn't listed first on the room, we may never find them. You also can't double book people, so if someone wants a block of 5 rooms, they all need to be done seperately, but you can't put the charges all on one account easily. You can tack on "additional rooms" but the system doesn't include those in the "reservation charge wizard" that we have to use because the finance department of the college gets titchy otherwise.

Finally, though check-out can take ~20 seconds, check-in takes 5+ minutes when it goes smoothly. Heavens help you if something goes sideways. And quite often our conferences are individual arrivals, but they show up in clusters, so we can have 20 people trying to all check in at once. We have 2 computers that can check people in. We only have one debit/credit terminal though. Also, since there's only 2 of us working at a time, we also have to do everything else.

As I said. They like to *think* they can handle stuff like this. But it's not set up for it.

*gasppantwheeze* whoa. I think that's been building up for a while. Thanks for letting me vent