THE DARK SIDE OF THE HOTEL
PART THREE (Women for the Night, Fine Motor Skills, The 41st Pole)
Petya was unquestionably on the opposite side of the barricades from the tourists. And for her, the reception desk was one of those very barricades. Raising her voice at a tourist, declaring that something was none of her concern, or telling them that their problems were their own was perfectly normal for her. That was how you dealt with the enemy: no ceremony!
Andrey Filipovich always looked forward to the moment when she would finally disappear into her own quarters after her shift. True, Petya would leave behind a list of tasks, but at least she took herself away with her. One regular duty of the night receptionist was making “passports” for the room keys. Someone in management had decided that this was beautiful. To be clear, it wasn’t the little cardboard passports themselves that were supposed to look beautiful, but the keys presented in their little envelopes.
An unprecedented quantity of colourful cardboard pieces bearing the name “Hotel Saturn” had been printed. These pieces of cardboard had to be folded into envelopes, somewhere between ten and fifty of them every night. This was, without a doubt, an excellent way to develop the receptionists’ fine motor skills. When opening an envelope, one had to write down the room number, the guests’ surnames, the arrival date, and, finally, the meal plan, which was invariably “all inclusive.” As you might easily guess, as soon as a tourist checked in, took out the key, and opened the door, the envelope went straight into the rubbish bin, having served absolutely no purpose. But the night receptionists had to be kept occupied with some kind of important work. Indeed, there were sometimes shifts when the night receptionist’s entire job consisted of the mere fact of staying awake through the night.
Before his first night shift, Petya informed Andrey Filipovich that a “woman for the night” would be coming. That was exactly how she put it: a “woman for the night.” It sounded enticing, even seductive. Naturally, Andrey Filipovich immediately recalled the words of the hotel manager, spoken during a rather intimate briefing on his first working day:
“We do not call prostitutes.”
The thing was, theory and reality at Hotel Saturn were constantly at odds. The manager’s theory, for instance, was “we smile,” while in reality, rudeness was perfectly acceptable. Although, in theory, one could smile and be rude at the same time. And Andrey Filipovich also remembered the manager’s clarification that had followed the words “we do not call prostitutes.” She had said, quite literally:
“However, if a guest arrives with a prostitute, we cannot prevent him from taking her to his room. But we must tell him that he is obliged to pay for a second person in the room.”
The approach was both democratic and commercially successful. When those attending the briefing asked the obvious question — “How do we distinguish a prostitute from a non-prostitute?” — they received a clear and straightforward answer: no hotel wristband on her arm meant she was a prostitute. No exceptions!
Andrey Filipovich waited. On that first occasion, the “woman for the night” turned out to be Todorka. He knew he would remember the expression “woman for the night” for the rest of his life. She was a tall, hefty, full-figured woman in work overalls. It was quite clear that she hadn’t come to play role-playing games with the guests, dressed up as a maid. She was the maid, damn it. Not a “lady of the night,” but a grandma on the night shift.
In fact, however, her presence was very timely. Some hotel guests were due to check out early the following morning. Andrey Filipovich was supposed to collect their keys, while someone had to inspect the rooms. So the “woman for the night” did turn out to be of some use to him.
All in all, he was fortunate enough to encounter three different “women for the night” before management discontinued the service. The second “woman for the night” was a Ukrainian woman in her seventies with very poor hearing. She could barely hear anything Andrey Filipovich tried to tell her. What was more, she never carried a mobile phone, which made her impossible to track down. When Andrey Filipovich asked why she went around without one, she explained, apparently finding her reasoning perfectly convincing, that her phone was too big and her pockets too small. She then turned her pockets inside out to demonstrate the point. Andrey Filipovich realized that there was no arguing with that kind of logic. The third “woman for the night” spoke only Bulgarian but always greeted him with a friendly smile. It was difficult to get anything else out of her besides that smile, but she was responsive and did her best.
After the “women for the night” had been phased out, early check-outs took place without any inspections to see whether the room contents had been left intact. One simply had to rely, so to speak, on the guests’ sense of responsibility. By the end of this story, it will become clear what a cruel joke that would turn out to be. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
It is worth noting that early check-outs themselves were never a problem. The same could not be said of night-time arrivals. There had been none at first, but eventually they turned into nightmares.
One night, a Bulgarian woman was due to arrive. Petya told Andrey Filipovich to wake her when she got there. And indeed, the Bulgarian woman did arrive, but not in a taxi. She came with her own driver, who was exhausted and in a highly unstable emotional state. Unfortunately, the driver was Bulgarian, too.
Waking Petya, even when she had asked to be woken, was a dangerous undertaking. Nevertheless, Andrey Filipovich woke her. Petya came to reception out of uniform and in a mood three times worse than usual. She took the arriving woman’s documents and, in exchange for a fee, allowed the driver to park on the premises. She didn’t spend much time explaining how to get into the parking lot, instead giving him a rough description with her fingers. He nodded. Apparently, he had understood.
The arrivals went back outside to park the car and collect their belongings. Andrey Filipovich remained relatively calm. The reception mobile phone was right beside him. By now, that phone was either always nearby or in Andrey Filipovich’s hands. He went to open the gate with it, took it to the toilet, took it to the dining room — in fact, everywhere. This was all because at some point Petya had warned him in no uncertain terms that if he missed a call from the owner on that phone, the owner would regard it as an open invitation to inevitable fucking disaster — in the form of dismissal. Like it or not, Andrey Filipovich had to take heed. Although having that mobile phone in his hands all the time was often extremely inconvenient.
Someone called Petya on her personal phone. Who could possibly be calling at half past one in the morning? She started chatting while simultaneously looking for something on the computer screen. And then, by a dramatic coincidence, the reception phone began to ring. Andrey Filipovich pressed the “answer” button.
An irritated voice could be heard at the other end of the line. It was the driver. From the general drift of the conversation, Andrey Filipovich gathered that the driver could not find the entrance to the parking lot and had probably driven well past where he was supposed to go. There was no other choice but to hand the phone to Petya. And Andrey Filipovich tried to do just that, but Petya pushed his hand away. In this respect, Petya was utterly without ceremony. This was not the first time she had pushed Andrey Filipovich in one way or another. Apparently, she found it a quicker way to get a message across when explaining it verbally would take too long.
Andrey Filipovich put the reception phone to his ear and politely asked the driver to wait. The driver clearly had no intention of waiting and kept shouting things into the receiver, such as “Identify yourself!” and “Who am I speaking to?” Andrey Filipovich understood that much, but decided it would be better to pretend he didn’t, since otherwise a complaint against him would surely follow. After that, he chose not to understand anything at all. He simply kept repeating one phrase:
“Please wait, my colleague is on the phone.”
The specific problem was that Andrey Filipovich would not have been able to explain how to get into the parking lot even in Russian. The entrance was complicated. And anyway, Andrey Filipovich travelled to work by bus.
…Petya’s phone conversation was entering its fifteenth minute. It was a setup. During those fifteen minutes, Andrey Filipovich had been subjected to an earful of some truly extraordinary Bulgarian swear words, which he also wisely chose not to understand.
At last, Petya ended her phone conversation and took the receiver from Andrey Filipovich. In a perfectly sweet manner, she explained to the driver how to get there, and he understood everything.
Get Сергей Хлебников (Sergii Khliebnikov)’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
The Bulgarian woman and her driver returned to reception, furious and exhausted. As they were leaving, the driver made a remark that Andrey Filipovich actually understood: “Why on earth do you have people working at reception who don’t speak Bulgarian?” It was unpleasant. Very unpleasant.
The next night shift was no easier, although at least there were no neurotic arrivals. A group of forty Poles was due to check in after midnight. This time, Petya asked not to be woken and told him to check them all in by himself.
For a while, things went reasonably well for Andrey Filipovich. Of course, finding people on the lists was not easy, but it was his first time doing it. He could enter everyone into the database calmly and methodically once the Poles had dispersed to their rooms. He had the whole night ahead of him.
And so, at long last, all forty Poles had been assigned their rooms.
But there was a problem: there turned out to be a forty-first guest. An unaccounted-for one. All attempts to persuade her to share someone else’s room temporarily, until morning, came to nothing. And objectively speaking, there wasn’t an extra bed available. Nor was there a “woman for the night” to whom this task could be delegated. The Poles, all of them together, were demanding that something be done.
Andrey Filipovich understood that calling Petya at such a moment would not end well, but he had no choice. She listened to his description of the situation and “arrived” five minutes later. Somehow, she managed to arrange an additional room with the manager. The Poles finally went off to settle in. But all of Petya’s demons had already been awakened. Any hope Andrey Filipovich had that she would go back to sleep vanished. She suddenly decided that the Poles had to be registered in the database right then and there. She took the first passport and ran it through the 3M scanner. The passport holder’s details appeared on the screen. She performed a few more operations, and the person was in the system.
“Your turn,” she said, as though someone needed to be given a final shot.
Andrey Filipovich assumed he was supposed to register all the remaining arrivals. He picked up a chair to place it next to the computer. What happened next was unexpected. Petya snatched the chair from him and put it back where it had been.
“Don’t sit down! Have you ever seen me sitting?”
Andrey Filipovich had, of course, seen Petya sitting on numerous occasions. Although at that particular moment, while registering the first guest, she was indeed standing. Andrey Filipovich registered the second guest. He did it correctly, but Petya apparently thought he was not doing it quickly enough. She shoved him away from the computer with her shoulder and began doing everything herself, in a jerky, frantic rhythm. Having demonstrated this burst of zeal, Petya went off to sleep.
In the morning, she returned to reception in a perfectly normal mood. Andrey Filipovich handed over his shift and went home to catch up on sleep.
That morning, he received a text message:
“Hello Andrey,
Please tomorrow HR will be wait for you at 8:30 morning in Saturn.
THANK YOU”
Andrey Filipovich was good at reading between the lines. This time, he walked towards the hotel with a light heart. The outcome of his two-week experiment was obvious. The only surprise was that his fellow receptionist had met exactly the same fate. His colleague had just as many stories to tell. If anything, Andrey Filipovich was lucky: he had not had to help a hotel guest who had been checked into a room with a shit-stained blanket, while all the maids had already gone home to sleep. His colleague, however, had had to…
Once, in Bulgaria, Andrey Filipovich had seen a bag of popcorn on sale with a bright advertising slogan: “Pukai s udovolstvie” (the curious reader can look up the meaning of the Bulgarian word pukai for themselves). Andrey Filipovich thought that this would make a perfect slogan for the hotel:
“POOP WITH PLEASURE! HOTEL SATURN.”
All the formal documents terminating the employment were signed. To the hotel’s somewhat unexpected credit, every shift worked was paid in full.
Everyone got what they came for. Andrey Filipovich, among other things, gained invaluable experience in seasonal hotel work.
After saying goodbye, Petya withdrew and proudly took her place at the reception desk. From then on, the only thing that could save the tourists from her was her own promotion.
Two cultured asteroids, unable to settle into the “Saturn” system, were drifting back into open space.
EPILOGUE
The priceless experience gained by Andrey Filipovich and his colleague during their two-week stint at the hotel came to a suspiciously abrupt and simultaneous end. After asking himself “why?” several times, and now having a much fuller picture of the circumstances, Andrey Filipovich realized that the question was purely rhetorical. The hotel had needed cultured people with experience, and then, all of a sudden, it no longer did. It was an open secret: the students who had worked at the reception desk at Hotel Saturn the previous season had just finished their exams.
Sergii Khliebnikov © 2024
You can read the rest of the story here:
https://medium.com/@sgkhliebnikov/the-dark-side-of-the-hotel-1530aae3b568?postPublishedType=repub
