The Hunt for the Author's Naked Wife
Episode 6 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…)
His books focused on the shadowy side of society. Misfits and addicts, loners and losers. At first glance, you couldn’t be blamed for mistaking him for one of the characters in his novels. You couldn’t be blamed for your bias, but you’d be very wrong.
Despite his dress code, his unshaven face, and his scraggly hair, he lived a life as normal as his suburban neighbours. He was actually better off than most which was why he always stayed in our upper-upscale hotel when he was in town, even on the rare occasion his publisher wasn’t footing the bill.
The protagonists living their lives on the edges of society were never married and never monogamous in their relationships. He was married and close to his spouse for all the years I knew him. According to Wikipedia, he still is.
She often accompanied him on the trips that brought him to our hotel and such was the case on the night I came to see more of her than I’d ever imagined.
Before I go on, there’s something you should know about guest room doors in well-run, upper-upscale hotels like ours.
The doors close, latch and lock automatically.
One of the reasons they do that is for fire safety. If the fire alarm goes off and you run outside without closing the door behind you, it will close and help limit the risk of spreading. Another reason is security. If you leave at any time and forget to close and lock the door behind you, the forward planning of the hotel designer will help protect your belongings.
Sometimes, bureaucrats upset the balance between safety and security. In Norway, they suddenly decided that fire safety trumps security so they required all doors on evacuation routes to close automatically to prevent the spread of fire but forbid them from locking so people evacuating could retrace their steps without the aid of a key. Guest room doors were designated as doors on an evacuation route because you had to use them to evacuate your room if the fire alarm went off.
I met with one of the people responsible for setting security aside. He didn’t listen to reason and said fire safety was most important and that it was just too bad if someone lost something from the room because they forgot to lock their door.
I gave him a different scenario. What about the young employee who tires of being harassed by their boss during the staff Christmas party? What if that person goes to their room and forgets to lock their door? What if that person’s boss gets drunk, enters the room and rapes the staff member?
“When the complaint comes in from the victim’s family, I’ll transfer the call to you and you can explain how fire safety is so much more than security. Is that OK?”
It wasn’t OK, but it wasn’t like he was going to amend the legislation he was so proud of either. Fortunately, we had a solution for him. It was based on two factors:
All electronic locks have built-in clocks and timers. For example, when you hold your card up to the reader, it unlocks the door so you can open it. About seven seconds after the door is latched again, the lock engages.
In a fire, the time in which an evacuee can retreat their steps if forced back by smoke and flames is limited.
The amendment didn’t change the regulation, but it did allow the local fire chief to authorize the period of time during which doors needed to be unlocked. Sixty seconds became the norm for most hotels.
Thank you for staying with me, we’ll soon return to the story about the author’s wife.
But first, there is one more delicate piece of background information necessary to set the scene.
Many people don’t sleep soundly for eight hours straight. A certain segment of the population, including me in recent years, wake up once or twice per night to pee. Some people might wake up and go for short walks for other reasons. My short walk always takes me to the same place for the same reason.
In hotels with excellent blackout curtains and self-closing, self-locking doors, the unfamiliarity of the dark space they wake up in can be confusing for some people.
The first time I experienced a guest in a confused and embarrassed state was during my first weekend on the job as a night security guard.
The chaos of the night had finally subsided. The lobby was dead quiet as I stood in the empty lobby, chatting with the night. manager while we waited for the first rays of sunlight to bathe the black asphalt outside the main entrance.
“Ding!”
The elevator bell that signalled a lift was arriving at lobby level rang out.
We heard the doors open. We looked over, but no one appeared. This was often the time when the so-called “ladies of the night” who had accompanied businessmen to their rooms after discussing prices over glasses of champagne in the nightclub would be leaving.
No one departed the elevator. The doors closed again.
“Ding”
The elevator doors opened again. This time a frightened Japanese guest dressed in silk pyjamas jumped out from the lift, waved his arms and jumped back in before the doors closed.
“Ding”, the elevator said again. When the doors opened, we were waiting.
A brief investigation, that included a pen and a piece of paper the guest could write his name and room number on helped us identify him and confirm where he was meant to be. Due to our lack of comprehension of Japanese symbols, he had to write his name twice. In the end, it was all good and we escorted the immaculately pyjamaed guest back to his room.
Similar scenarios played out at irregular intervals throughout my years in the hotel.
It was a dissimilar scenario that led to my first face-to-everything meeting with the author’s spouse.
Security guards performed two regular “23rd-and-down” inspection rooms every night in our five-hundred-room hotel.
The first was sometime around 1:30-2:30 a.m. One of the key objectives was to collect room service breakfast orders off the door handles of guests who wanted breakfast in bed, or, at least, in their room.
The second, usually between 0400 and 0500, was affectionately called, “collect the drunks from the corridor”. The objective was to ensure that when the world woke up, everything in the hotel would be normal. Sometimes, guests would make it from the nightclub to the guestroom floors, but not be able to navigate the key close enough to the card reader, or, having done that, not had the necessary coordination to open the door and enter within the aforementioned seven-second time limit. Some gave up and lay down to sleep in the corridor. During our round, we would find them, figure out which room they were meant to be in and assist them into the room.
When you wander the corridors of a large hotel in the quiet hours night after night, your senses are trained to expect the unexpected and draw your attention to every anomaly. (Ask my wife, even today, I can’t walk down any hotel hallway without noting three or four things that aren’t quite as they should be. At least.)
As soon as I stepped into the 18th-floor corridor from the spiral emergency staircase, the hair on the back of my neck spiked. I stopped and listened. Something wasn’t right. It was deathly quiet. The corridors in the hotel were in the form of an offset “H”, so, in essence, there were four short corridors on each floor, connected by the elevator lobby in front of the guest lifts. They were also connected by a service area where housekeeping stores and service elevators were, but the service area was enclosed by doors on either side.
I made my way across the elevator area and peered down the 18-24 corridor.
Nothing.
I went a little further, so I could look down the 13 - 17 corridor. A shadowy figure disappeared through a door to the service area.
I sped swiftly down the corridor and opened the door to the service area, just in time to see a bright white buttocks escape through the door on the opposite side. I ran across the service area and flung the door open on the room 6 - 12 side.
Our gazes met. She was standing outside 1806. Frozen like a deer staring at headlights on a highway, probably afraid to move into the brightly lit landing in front of the guest elevators.
I retreated back into the service area. I wasn’t afraid because I now knew what had happened and how I could help. I grabbed some sheets from the linen store in the service area and placed them on the corridor floor.
A minute or two later, I took the long way around, back through the service area to the 13-17 corridor, across the guest elevator landing and peeked down the 6-12 corridor.
The author’s wife had swaddled herself in the linen I’d left for her.
She silently whispered the number of her suite, so silently that it was inaudible. It didn’t matter. The number of the famous author’s suite was on our VIP list, and she was easily recognizable from the newspaper interviews that always plastered the papers when her husband was in town.
Not another word was spoken as I opened the door with my master key and she slipped back into the room.
Many words were spoken in the staff canteen afterwards and plenty of laughter ensued. But not a word of what had happened leaked outside the hotel. The staff was well-trained and professional. Besides, we had seen it all anyway. This was nothing out of the ordinary for a busy Saturday night. (See GIF below)
I know what you’re thinking.
“Have you ever been stuck naked in a corridor, Paul?” or “Hey Paul, I get up to pee in the middle of the night. How can I prevent this from happening to me?
The answers are simple.
No, it hasn’t happened to me.
It’s fully preventable. Always use the safety chain or collar on the inside of your door. They only provide limited security because any fireman, security guard or other authorized person can easily breach them, but, if you try to open the wrong door on your way to the bathroom, they will jolt you awake and alert you to the pending embarrassment.
If you don’t like to use those extra security devices, I strongly advise you invest in fashionable pyjamas like the ones pictured earlier.
Just in case!
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
Episode 5 - The $100 000 Needle in the Haystack
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