He stopped his yelling and looked at me, confused, “Uh, yeah, why?”
I pushed it shut, and the curtains fell silent against the wall. I bent and pushed the curtains aside. Tiny dead bugs like the ones Mr. Ingram had collected in the glass were scattered around the floor. I had seen this before, so it didn’t surprise me. I scooped up a couple of the small carcasses in my hand and walked back to show him.
At first he recoiled slightly, disgusted that I would touch such things. Then he peered cautiously into my hand and then back up at me as if justified in his anger.
“Yeah, see?” he shouted. “They’re everywhere! It’s disgusting!”
“You must be one of the luckiest men alive, Mr. Ingram,” I smiled at him.
I could see by his clenched teeth and red face that he didn’t understand.
“They’re lady bugs,” I said. “The vacuum from your window being left open and the wind is pulling them inside. You’ve never seen lady bugs before?” I asked, somewhat amazed.
He seemed puzzled and a little uncertain as to how he should respond.
I saw he had a laptop open on the bed. “Do you mind?” I asked, motioning to the computer.
“Huh uh,” he shook his head, still looking a bit unsure.
Over the years I had found you had to be careful in these types of situations. You didn’t want to make the guest feel like a complete idiot, but you wanted them embarrassed enough so that they backed off and admitted they’d made a mistake. Therefore, I remained humble, and didn’t take that “I told you so” attitude.
I bent to click open his web browser and typed “lady bug” into the search engine. In an instant, up popped the search results and a row of pictures showing the little creatures in various positions and places. I clicked on one of the pictures to enlarge it and turned the laptop so that Mr. Ingram could see the screen.
He stared, mouth open, unsure of what to say.
“They say lady bugs are good luck, but I’ll have housekeeping take care of the mess on the floor and bring you a new glass,” I smiled pleasantly.
He just stood there.
I took the glass from his hand as I walked by and replaced it with a business card. “We appreciate your business, Mr. Ingram. Have a wonderful day, sir; and feel free to contact me if you have any further issues.” I paused at the door. “Oh, and I advise that you keep your windows closed at night unless you want more little visitors.”
Then I left.
It was almost noon, so I took a service elevator down to the employee cafeteria for a lunch of lukewarm lasagna, breadsticks, and leftover pastries from last night’s dinner event for the Acorn Electric group. Then I headed up to my room for a nap. I wanted to get a jump on acclimating myself to the night shift and decided I would start early, making the transition tonight rather than tomorrow.
CHAPTER FOUR
I could clearly see from the few hours I spent working last night’s third shift, that one of my main tasks was going to be building Kristen – the little blonde firecracker of a front desk night supervisor – and her staff into a more fully functioning and cohesive team.
In particular, this task would center on turning Kristen’s front desk supervisor mentality into more of a hotel supervisor’s mentality, creating an assistant M.O.D. so to speak. She was too focused on what was going on in the front office, when what she needed to be focusing her attention on – especially on a Friday or Saturday night – was what was happening in the rest of the hotel.
From the ballrooms to the parking garage and everything in between, it was obvious that she needed help seeing the whole picture. Right now she was only seeing about twenty percent of it.
I quickly found that Kristen – like a deer in the headlights – froze when faced with a tough decision. Being young and coming from a management role in retail sales, she just hadn’t been around a hotel environment long enough to have experienced many of the situations that I had seen over the years. She was a sweet girl, a quick learner, and showed lots of promise from what I’d seen during my first night working with her. She just needed to learn how to deal with the kinds of things that were going to be tossed her way on a regular basis in a hotel this size. A few more weeks with me – especially dealing with nights like last night – and she’d get it.
The night actually started off smoothly enough. It wasn’t until the wedding receptions taking place in the fourth floor ballrooms started getting ramped up that the issues began.
The first figurative “fire” that Kristen and I put out started in the ballroom restrooms. The over 400 guests comprising the two wedding receptions were destroying the four available ballroom restrooms and overwhelming housekeeping’s one public space attendant assigned to maintain these spaces.
Toilet paper was running out, trash cans were overflowing, wine glasses and beer bottles were piling up on sinks, and the restrooms’ tiled floors were becoming slip-and-fall hazards. Plus, the single female attendant couldn’t even make it into the men’s restrooms since there was a continuous flow of male guests moving to and from them.
I told Kristen to contact John Rodgers, the night housekeeping manager. He didn’t answer his office phone so I had her call him on his radio. As soon as he answered, I told her to have him call me in my office. Two minutes later the phone rang. I made sure Kristen was listening.
“Front desk, this is Robert.”
“Hi Robert, it’s John. What’s up?”
“Yeah, John, your attendant covering the ballrooms is getting swamped. The restrooms are trashed and she can’t get in to clean the men’s rooms at all. Can you pull a couple of attendants from other cleaning routes to help out until these events are over? At least two guys and maybe another lady?”
“Sure, no problem, Robert. I’ll pull Annie from the fitness center and Maynard and Paul from the marble care team since they can’t do anything anyway with all the guests milling around down in the lobby and arcade. I’ll have them give Rosalind a hand up there.”
“Thanks, John,” I said, hanging up the phone and turning to Kristen. “Lesson number one, housekeeping is your ace in the hole. In a bind, they can typically pull cleaners from a number of areas to help out in other places. You have to watch out for labor union rule violations depending upon what you need them to do and how it applies to their job description, but they’re usually pretty accommodating. John is a team player, and he’s good at thinking outside the box, so if you find yourself in a jam, he’s a good resource to call.
“Sounds good,” Kristen nodded.
Lesson number two came about an hour later.
The proximity of the two wedding receptions to one other was leading to issues beyond just the trashing of the restrooms though. At around midnight, a group of guests from the Scott/Fitzgerald wedding party thought it would be a fun idea – seeing as how they had a cash bar at their reception – to make a raid upon the open bar of the Vishna/Punjab wedding next door. The plan might have worked had the raiding party – comprised entirely of members of Anglo-Saxon decent – not looked a tad conspicuous standing in line at a Hindu wedding reception. While the bride’s father was accommodating, choosing to look the other way as the uninvited guests imbibed, Mr. Fitzgerald was less than pleased when he found his new son-in-law partaking in some “Bollywood” dancing with several Vishna bridesmaids.
Then a Punjab family raiding party was formed, and in reprisal, they took a huge chunk of the Scott/Fitzgerald wedding cake.
From that point forward, it was on!
Battle lines were drawn, yelling matches began, and things appeared to be taking a turn for the worse. On a positive note though, the distraction did free up the neighboring restrooms for a good cleaning by the housekeeping department.
Kristen and I made it up to the ballrooms on the fourth floor with two members of the security staff just as things were beginning to break down. As we stepped off the elevator, a piece of wedding cake came sailing through the air from the Scott/Fitzgerald front line, b
arely missing Mrs. Vishna and hitting a bust of our hotel’s namesake, Samuel Lanigan, leaving the side of his bronzed face plastered in coconut frosted icing.
A beer bottle from the Vishna/Punjab wedding party came whizzing past my head in return fire as I darted between the battle lines. I wasn’t even going to try to clear up the misunderstandings. It was well past that point.
I motioned to Kristen and the two security guards to move to the other side of the wall opposite me. “Grab the wall,” I yelled as another piece of cake sailed overhead.
“You want cake?” I heard one of the Fitzgerald guests yell. “Here’s your stinkin’ cake!”
The security guards realized what I was doing and met me in the middle as I pulled my portion of a sliding wall partition toward them, dividing the space and separating the two groups from further conflict.
I stationed one security guard on either side of the temporary wall until the events were over and then took Kristen back down to the relative safety of the back office, thinking that our problems were over for the night.
I was wrong.
The wedding parties were not to let me down, providing one last hurdle to clear for the evening. As things began to die down up on the fourth floor, and the wedding singers began packing it in for the evening, the wedding guests who were not staying the night began to trickle downstairs in preparation for heading home. Once the receptions’ bars closed and there was no more booze to be had, that trickle became a stream, and then a flood.
This wouldn’t normally have been a problem but for the fact that one of our valet parkers was out sick and another had gone home early because it was slow. Since the weddings had gone a little later than expected, the parking attendants figured that most of the guests had decided to stay over at the hotel and therefore had only left one valet parker to deal with the remaining vehicles.
Even one valet parking attendant could have handled the forty or so cars worth of guests had they come down in small groups over a period of an hour or so, but they didn’t. They came down in one big group.
The hotel’s valet parking was leased out to a private company and therefore wasn’t something the hotel had any real control over, but we had to deal with the complaints when the parkers were slow or let things back up. The company had a tendency to cut staff short in order to save a buck, which was no big deal to them since they didn’t have to deal with the repercussions.
Tonight, the backlog of waiting wedding guests was exacerbated by the fact that the taxi cab line was taking up the majority of the street space in front of the hotel entrance. This was clogging the flow of self-park vehicles coming from the parking garage to pick up waiting wedding guests and slowing down the lone valet parking attendant who was also trying to get vehicles to the hotel’s main entrance as well.
It was a complete mess.
Horns were honking. Fitzgeralds were yelling at Vishnas. Vishnas were yelling at Scotts. Scotts were cursing at Punjabs. Vehicles waiting to pick up wedding guests were honking at the cabbies to get out of the way. Cabbies were yelling at the wedding guests to stop honking. Security was yelling at the cabbies to pull up the block. And the valet parking attendant was somewhere in the backlog of vehicles stuck inside the garage waiting for everyone to stop screaming at each other.
Kristen and I arrived on this chaotic scene, and I knew what was coming if we didn’t move fast. The hotel’s sound proof windows only went up to the 8th floor, and even then they weren’t a lot of good against 25 blaring car horns and a crowd of screaming guests all centered directly in front of the building at two in the morning.
Bingo! 2 a.m.! Lunch time!
“Kristen.”
“Yeah boss,” she said, giving me a “What the hell do we do with THIS mess?” look.
“Run up to the cafeteria. See if you can find Sergeants Grakowski and Mitts. Tell them what’s going on and ask them to meet me out here.”
I handed her my phone. “On your way, call Doug in security and tell him to get out front asap.”
She stood looking at me as if waiting for more.
“GO!” I said, pointing. “And get back here as quick as you can.”
“Okay,” she said, hurrying back inside.
I grabbed the nearest security guard who was in the process of catching his breath after a verbal volley with the nearest cabbie. I did a quick glance at his name tag since I didn’t recognize him.”
“Steve,” I said.
“Yeah?” he answered, looking anything but bothered by what was happening around us.
I held out my hand, “Robert.”
He shook it and nodded. “Nice night for coming to the night shift, huh?”
“Yeah, great. Hey, do me a favor will ya? Tell that first cab in line to pull up to the end of the block. I’ll talk to the one behind him, then you leapfrog me and get the one behind that, and we’ll move down the line. Most of them will listen if we tackle them one on one and in order. If we can get these damn cabs out of the way, there will be room for the other cars to pick up the waiting guests, and once we get them out of here, the valet parker will be able to get caught up.”
He nodded. “Got it.”
I grabbed the other security guard who was standing at the main entrance watching everything go down.
“Go calm the guests down,” I told him. “Explain to them we’ll have this taken care of shortly and that we’ll get the cabs out of here so they can be on their way.”
“Okay,” he grumbled.
As security guard Steve and I got the cabs organized, Kristen returned with security sergeant Doug, as well as sergeants Grakowski and Mitts, Chicago Police Department beat cops who were hotel regulars. They typically stopped in at our cafeteria for a hot meal – complements of the hotel – during the night shift. I had gotten to know them during my training on the third shift during my first few weeks at the Lanigan.
“Hey-hey, Robert, it’s been a long time. Good to see you buddy,” Grakowski boomed out, merrily pushing his way through a mob of angry wedding guests, and slapping me on the back.
“Same here,” I breathed heavily. “Mind giving us a hand sorting this mess out?”
“No prob,” Mitts boomed. “We got this.”
All I needed were the uniforms to get everyone in shape, and I knew that these two officers loved a little action from time to time, especially when it allowed them to throw their authority around a bit and really didn’t involve anything dangerous.
It didn’t take long for them to get everyone in line.
These guys had been beat cops in and around downtown Chicago for nineteen and twenty-two years respectively, and they didn’t take any guff from anyone. When the hotel was having a problem with a couple homeless guys sleeping on some mattresses that were waiting to be disposed of on the loading dock, Grakowski and Mitts gave them a warning. When the homeless guys returned and were again found soundly sleeping on the mattresses, there were no more warnings. The officers nonchalantly walked over to the mattresses in turn, each grabbing a corner and casually lifting, rolling the homeless men off the side of the dock.
That was the way these guys operated; so a few unhappy wedding guests and a couple mouthy cab drivers were a walk in the park for them. And with their food getting cold in the cafeteria, they weren’t wasting any time.
Twenty minutes later, things had quieted down. The valet parker was a few cars away from being caught up, and Kristen and I accompanied sergeants Grakowski and Mitts back to the cafeteria for a bite to eat.
***
By 3 a.m., things had quieted down inside the hotel and out.
The third shift front desk staff was catching their breaths, relaxing a bit, and running a few night audit reports while chatting about the night’s events.
I felt I’d had a good enough taste of how Kirsten handled herself and the night staff and that she could take it from here.
“Alright, I’m heading up,” I said to Kristen after we finished our rounds of the public space, whic
h included ensuring the ballrooms were cleared, stopping in at Carlisle’s Whiskey Lounge to check on things, and passing through the lobby to ensure no way-ward drunks had decided to call it a night on one of the plush sofas scattered throughout the massive space.
“Sounds good,” Kristen smiled. “Thanks a ton for your help tonight, I really appreciate it.”
“No problem,” I smiled back. “A hotel this size will eat you alive if you’re not ready for it, but you’ll be fine. It just takes some time to get used to.”
On the way back up to my room, I took a little detour. With the hotel quiet now, I walked down to street level and said goodnight to the security guard manning the main entrance (the only entrance we kept open at night for security purposes), then took the stairs down to the first sub-street level, 1B.
1B was one of my favorite floors. It was like walking through a time-warp. Very little had changed in this part of the hotel since the mid-70s, and the floor just had a certain feel about it.
The hotel had seen its heyday from the late 1930s on through the early 50s. Its Lake Ballroom had played host to some of the most prominent and well-known performers and entertainers of the day, and the hotel at that time was known for its opulence and top-notch service.
Every elevator was manned by an actual operator up until the early 1970s. In fact, the Lanigan was the last hotel – and maybe building – in Chicago to provide its guests with such an amenity.
But manned elevator service wasn’t enough to maintain the hotel’s position as a world leader in hospitality. As the Rat Pack era faded into oblivion, performers began asking for more and more money, reducing the number of shows the Lanigan could put on, while at the same time, interest in such entertainment began to dwindle.
A partial renovation in 1964 – rather than rehabilitating and maintaining many of historic aspects and areas of the hotel – ripped them out and replaced them with 60’s-style gaud. Areas like the lobby, ballrooms and 1B spaces had thankfully remained untouched with the exception of certain new furnishings; however, much of the other public space and all of the guest rooms had undergone a complete renovation that destroyed much of the hotel’s elegant character and previous grandeur.
The Case of the Guest Who Stayed Over (The M.O.D. Files Book 1) Page 3