Surreal Stories from the Hidden Side of Hotels
Part 1 - The Office on the 15th floor
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 the life has to offer.
In this series, twice weekly, I’ll share stories from behind the scenes in the world’s greatest job in the world’s most fun and rewarding (at least educationally rewarding) industry.
By the end of the series, 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… more or less)
Part 1 - The Hidden Office
Despite his reluctance at my interview, and straight out telling me on the phone that he didn’t want to hire me, in 1987 the Security Manager’s hand was forced by circumstances many businesses face today. No one wanted the job. Well, one other person applied, but they turned it down when offered it. The manager was stuck with an old (27), educated (dropped out of my Master’s in Organizational Psychology programme) and opinionated (OK, I’ll give him that), candidate.
Since I stepped into a vacant role they desperately needed to fill, my training was fast-tracked. I followed a colleague around on a Friday night from 11 pm to 11 am. For the most part, that meant going from the office to the lobby to the canteen.
“Always go to the canteen via the lobby, it makes people think you’re busy.”
At 2:00 am, it was time for the nightly “23 down” round. We went to the roof and made our way down to the underground parking garage. En route, my colleague/mentor opened technical rooms, storage rooms, offices, and other spaces. He explained what was inside each one. If we found burnt-out light, an unlocked door, or a room service tray in the hallway, he made a note. I didn’t take notes and would regret that 24 hours later. The entire walk-through took just over an hour. We ended our tour with a walk through the lobby on our way to increase our dwindling caffeine levels.
As we passed through the reception area at around 0315 (security was on the 24-hour military clock), I had the first of what would be many celebrity sightings during my career. It was the anchor from a national news programme. The person the country trusted as he solemnly shared the events of the day. He was always immaculately dressed, dark suit and tie, and perfectly styled hair. On this particular night, he entered through the double sliding doors on an old banana bike and tried to silently cycle undetected along the edge of the lobby toward the elevators. A young female, possibly the bicycle’s owner, was walking alongside him. She was, at most, 15. My colleague intercepted the stealthy cyclist and greeted him by name. The inebriated rider was, initially, happy to be recognized and introduced us to his “niece”. When he was informed that the hotel, unfortunately, couldn’t accommodate them, he loudly and in language that would be bleeped on the evening news, informed us we would both be fired the next morning. It wasn’t the last time, I would be told that. It happened almost every shift.
The next night, my training continued. At 0200, the colleague that had led me through the hotel the night before gave me a two-way radio and said:
“Do the same round we did last night. If you get lost, call me on this and we’ll figure out where you are and where you should go.”
As I exited the office, he opened the deepest drawer in the desk and pulled out a pornographic magazine to enjoy with his coffee. I believe I disturbed him more often than he wished. I should have taken notes on Day 1.
After that, I was a fully-trained hotel security guard and I could start working more independently. The boss offered me overtime to come in on my week off because a risk engineer from the insurance company was coming to do a site visit. What I thought would be the equivalent of a “23 down”, perhaps with more note-taking, was a five-day educational odyssey into the world of hotels, fire, and risk. We went everywhere, and he photographed everything. A tiny hole drilled through a wall, doors that didn’t close and seal properly, and hundreds of wooden wedges that propped open doors that were meant to be closed for fire separation. On the 15th floor, we entered a large technical room. We made our way through narrow passages and, finally, we went through a raised, one-metre-tall, rubber-sealed door about a half metre off the floor. It felt like it had been designed for a submarine and I wondered how bad the floods would be if it was to serve a purpose more than forty metres above street level.
As my eyes started to adjust to the darkness of the cramped room full of pipes and ductwork, I noticed a sliver of light coming from across the room and I knew the all-seeing, all-picture-taking engineer would make a beeline for it.
The light was coming from behind a huge air duct that almost sealed off the space behind it. The engineer squeezed through the tiny crawlspace, leaving me in the dark because he blocked the sole light source. When he popped out the other side and the rays of light returned I heard him exclaim:
“Well, well, well, what have we here?”
Fortunately, I was in relatively good shape, i.e., not as corpulent as I had been in my childhood years, so I squeezed through the gap hoping to help answer his question.
The light source was a desk lamp. The lamp was on an actual desk. Don’t ask me how anyone had gotten it in there. The desk was cluttered with paper and a man in a maintenance team uniform sat there on an office chair with wheels. His chair was far superior to the ones we had in the security office and, again, don’t ask me how they got it in there.
The man wasn’t doing maintenance work. In fact, he was a painter, and nothing in the room full of pipes and ducts would ever need painting anyway. The papers were betting slips. Soccer, horses, dogs, you name it. The man at the desk was a bookie. Yes, he was employed and paid a nice salary as a painter, but he was a bookie. No, he wasn’t fired, perhaps because his clients were mostly management team members. His office, however, was permanently closed that day.
A few weeks after the visit from the insurance risk engineer, a thick package was waiting on the desk in the security office when I arrived for my night shift. It had my name on it.
It contained a book with the insurance company logo and was thick enough to remind me why I dropped out of my Master’s studies. Fortunately, unlike all those books in academia, it turned out to be a picture book. Four photographs were glued onto each of the hundred-and-something pages. Below each picture was a caption explaining what was wrong in the picture when viewed from the perspective of a fire risk engineer. Some had arrows or circles drawn in red Sharpie to help untrained eyes find the problem in the picture, some didn’t.
A note was taped to the cover page.
“Make five copies of this. Take one copy with you and check whether the issues have been fixed. Make notes in the copy. Check for new issues and note them in the copy too. Write work orders for everything that hasn’t been fixed and for new things you find.”
Apart from being called away by a colleague that needed help for things like drafting a report about how a bar patron’s nose had been broken by an unfortunate accident on the marble floor as he was being assisted out the rear exit by the bouncers, or when he needed help to load drunk, sleeping guests onto baggage trolleys in the nightclub so we could cart them up to their rooms, and other daily occurrences, using the fire insurance inspection report to guide me through every inch of the several hundred thousand square foot building.
For years, we continued to make copies and use them for training new security officers. To this day, that book remains one of the reasons why I can’t walk down a hotel hallway without noticing anomalies.
But in the hundreds upon hundreds of hotels I’ve visited and “explored” since, I’ve never found another hidden bookie office!
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 that had a storied, basement-to-boardroom career in hotel security.
In addition to my love for writing, I’m also a professor, an educator, and a consultant. I’ve been told that my specialty is saving bacon.
Thanks for being part of the Always Care Community. Your support is my motivation and I’m genuinely grateful that you’re here. Please share, subscribe, and connect with me.
I assume you’ll eventually share both Lunch and the Empty safe.
Hey Paul! I noticed the pole was closed by the time I got around to reading this. Just letting you know because some people might be in the same situation.