The $100 000 Needle in the Haystack
Episode 5 of Surreal Stories from the Hidden World of Hotels
Before we begin…
I had a thirty-year career at a hotel company that didn’t want to hire me. The journey from being “too old, too educated”, and having “too many opinions” to qualify as a hotel security guard to being awarded the company’s highest individual honour, to being selected by my peers as the world’s most influential corporate security executive, was one of non-stop experiences, spanning everything you can imagine, and a lot that you can’t!
From “Wait, what?!?” to “OMG” to “I’m pinching myself, but I’m not waking up”, sooner or later, a career in hotels will expose you to all life has to offer.
In this series, I’ll share stories from behind the scenes in the world’s greatest job in the world’s most fun and rewarding (life-lesson rewarding, as opposed to monetary) industry.
By the end of it, you’ll agree that working in security is the best hotel education one can receive, and you’ll wonder why many hotels and hotel groups are run by former cooks and accountants instead of former hotel security guards. (Yes, I’m being sarcastic… perhaps…)
These days nobody bats an eye when we tap a card against a reader to pay for gas, use an app on a phone to transfer money, scan another app to buy tickets to the cinema, or wave our phone near a reader to pay for groceries.
It wasn’t always this way…
When I was growing up, we paid cash.
Some people wrote cheques. (Unfathomably, some people still do.)
Rich people had credit cards.
In 1987, when my hotel career began, the majority of people paid cash. Cash was king and we protected it with our lives. Every waiter, every front desk employee, and a number of others had “floats” so they could give change when people paid with larger bills.
Hotels weren’t banks, but guests could get cash from the front desk if they didn’t have local currency or if they needed it for use in cash-only establishments. In our 500-room hotel, every front desk float contained more than the average gross monthly wage for a Security Officer like me.
Each person was responsible for their float, but it was a team effort to keep them balanced.
At the end of the month, there was always a mad scramble of people trying to borrow money from each other when the floats were counted.
Interest-free borrowing from floats was commonplace.
If borrowing temporarily from the till was common, so was “forgetting” to pay the bill.
The term “good old days” might refer to the time when hotels extended credit to anyone and everyone. Every guest who walked in off the street and filled in a registration card automatically qualified for credit that amounted, at least, to the full cost of the stay. There were no ID or credit checks during the registration process and most front desk agents didn’t really worry too much about what name the guest wrote on the card.
People often left the hotel without paying. Security investigated, tracked them down, and tried to recover our losses. This was difficult when the name on the credit card was Donald Duck, Chase Gioberti, or simply 007. Some people used non-existent addresses (e.g. North Pole, Norway). Fortunately, in those pre-cellphone days, many guests used the in-room telephone, the system logged the numbers, and the numbers were all in the phone book. The challenge for us was that many calls went to escort services who could be less than forthcoming about sharing information.
On weekends, when walk-outs were prevalent, Security Officers with a lot of experience knew that when the phone started ringing after 8 p.m. on a Sunday evening, it was the perfect time to offer to do a coffee run to the canteen. The call would undoubtedly be from reception saying someone was on their way down with the weekend “walk-outs”. The rule was that whoever accepted the piles of walk-out material was responsible for investigating and recovering the hotel losses. Needless to say, as a newbie, until I learned enough about the Sunday evening routines and behaviour of my colleagues, I learned a lot about investigating and investigations. I also learned a lot about the behaviour and mindset of the people who tried to defraud our hotel. My years of university Psychology studies found one of their many practical applications in the world of hotels. Many of our guests were wealthy, or had expense accounts that allowed them to behave like they were wealthy, and credit card usage was rapidly on the rise.
Credit cards were like gold. As long as someone had one, their credit was almost unlimited. It wasn’t, but people racked up huge bills in the nightclub while the banks were closed, so for all intents and purposes, it was.
It’s hard to believe today, but in those days, so-called credit card slips were almost like cash. When someone paid by credit card, the card and a small form with three copies separated by carbon paper would be inserted into an imprinter. The employee would drag a noisy handle from one end of the imprinter to the other. Rollers under the handle would squeeze the form against a metal plate that had hotel details on it and these would be printed onto the form.
The top (original) was for the guest as a receipt. The two copies were for the hotel and the bank. Employees would detach the customer receipt and give it to the guest. At the end of their shift, employees would drop their cash envelopes into a safe and then drop their credit card slips (copies for accounting and the bank) into a mailbox outside the security office.
Fun fact about the carbon paper between each copy of the credit card receipts. In some locations, front desk personnel were offered large sums of money to sell the carbon copies. Information on the copies was used to make counterfeit cards. Credit card fraud isn’t new, folks.
But, I digress… let’s get back to the story.
Each morning an accountant would empty the mailbox and take the slips to their office, where the bank and hotel copies would be separated. The bank copies would be sent over to the bank who would then transfer money to the hotel accounts and claim back the money from the credit card company who in turn would bill the card owner. It’s a bit simpler and a whole lot quicker today.
The accountant didn’t work on weekends. To save them the trouble of sorting through a whole weekend of receipts, Security would empty the mailbox on Saturday and Sunday mornings. Receipts were placed in plastic bags. Bin liners actually. When the accountant arrived on Monday morning he would collect the Sunday night receipts from the mailbox. The two plastic garbage bags, full of Friday and Saturday night receipts, were picked up off the floor in the security office and handed to the accountant.
The accountant was an early riser and always arrived before the night shift was off duty at 7:00 a.m. On this particular morning, I was night shift. We exchanged our usual pleasantries and I gave him the key to the mailbox. He emptied it and was standing outside the office when he said: “Where are they?”
There were no plastic bags on the office floor.
We searched high and low but couldn’t find the bags of credit card receipts. We called the people who’d been on weekend shifts. They said, and their activity reports also noted, that they had emptied the mailbox as usual, put the receipts in a bin liner as usual, and left the bin liners on the floor. As usual.
No one seemed to have any idea that this was a potentially big problem. There was joking and laughing. People wondered who the prankster was and where the bin liners were hidden.
Finally, someone made the connection. Every other bin liner in the hotel was thrown into a trash compactor. What if someone had thrown the bin liners away?
Housekeeping was contacted and yes, indeed, a new, extra diligent employee confirmed that maybe, just possibly, they might have picked up bin liners from the security office floor and thrown them into the compactor on Sunday morning. By Monday morning, the compactor would have been used multiple times and there was no way we would be able to get the receipt-filled bin liners out.
It was about this time that the joking stopped and the smile disappeared from the accountant’s face.
“They’re important,” he said. “It could represent a big loss for us if we can’t send the bank their copies of the receipts.”
“How much are we talking about,” my boss asked as ash fell from his unfiltered cigarette
“I don’t know”, said the accountant. “But quite a bit.”
“That’s not a number!”
My boss hadn’t had his morning coffee and his shaking indicated he was getting angry, needed another cigarette, or both.
“More than 10,000?”, he grunted.
“More than 10,000.” The accountant confirmed. “Much more. It’s a lot!”
Just about then, surveillance monitors showed the garbage truck backing into the compactor room. The container would be loaded up and driven to an incinerator facility where the contents would be burned.
“Stop that guy!” Yelled my decaffeinated, nicotine-depleted boss. Then he turned to me and said, “Do you want some overtime?”
It was a rhetorical question. Security officers always wanted overtime and answering “no” wasn’t an option anyway.
No one said no to the boss.
Engineering loaned me a pair of overalls and the garbage truck driver allowed me to join him in the cab. He wasn’t happy about having to drive to the landfill instead of the incineration place, but his boss had given him the rest of the day off so he wasn’t too upset.
At the landfill, after convincing the people there that we were on an important mission, we were finally allowed to back in toward a massive pile of garbage. It smelled horrible to me, but the odour didn’t bother the seagulls, rats, and rodents that enjoyed the easy pickings the pile offered.
The driver slowly tipped the contents of the container out. I poked and stabbed them with a ski pole from “lost and found”.
(It’s not weird to find a single ski pole in lost and found at a hotel. Compared to some things you will find there it’s actually not weird at all...)
It seemed hopeless and became even more hopeless when suddenly all the remaining contents of the container slid out without warning. I was lucky not to be buried alive.
As I stood there waist-deep in a weekend's worth of hotel garbage, I knew my boss wouldn’t allow me to return without the missing bin liners.
The poking continued.
Eureka!
The ski pole ripped open a black plastic garbage bag and in the opaque, thin plastic bags it contained, I could see familiar yellow and pink rectangles.
A closer look confirmed that the needles in the haystack were found.
When the truck driver dropped me off back at the hotel, I was hailed as a hero.
During my absence, the accountant had calculated that the receipts had a value of the equivalent of about one hundred thousand US dollars.
Apart from the overtime hours, there was no bonus or reward paid for recovering the valuable plastic bin liners full of credit card receipts. We did however purchase two large, lockable briefcases for the weekend credit card receipts. One was marked Saturday, the other was marked Sunday.
I guess the moral of the story is that if something looks like it’s worthless and you treat it like it’s worthless, someone else might think it is worthless and that could cause you problems.
I guess you could say that about people too.
Look for value.
You never know where you’ll find it or when you’ll be called upon to go find it!
Stay safe, Always Care
Written with the clarity of hindsight, the accuracy of a faded memory, and countless creative liberties, 87 Stories is a journal of how my gap year lasted four decades, made me an emigrant, an immigrant and gave me a life I never dreamed of.
This current series gives a behind-the-scenes look at the wacky, wonderful world of hotels from the eyes of a university dropout who had a storied, basement-to-boardroom career in hotel security. Be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss any of the episodes in the pipeline!
Here are the links to earlier episodes:
Episode 1 - The Office on the 15th floor
Episode 2 - The CEO and the Empty Safe
Episode 4 - Have a plan or someone gets punched in the face
Next week, in honour of his birthday, we’ll look at why the “Boss” is a celebrity I would always welcome into our hotels. On a lighter side, there will also be an article about how I hunted down a famous author’s naked wife in the corridors of a high-rise hotel…
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