Coffee, Tea, and Camaraderie:3rd-Shift Nostalgia
If you’re like me, for a time you worked 3rd shift weekends at a local hotel. This was in graduate school and I was substitute teaching during the week, but that was inconsistent enough that working the night audit at a hotel fit right in. Friday and Saturday night, I would ride my bike a mile and a half for my 11:00pm shift and take charge of the building knowing I would be the only employee on the grounds until 6:30am.
It was a weird job, consisting mainly of processing a handful of computer programs, some spreadsheet work which was surprisingly fun, and switching everything over for the next day. There was a special math I had to work out based on how many rooms had guests staying another night and how many would be vacated. This equation projected how much time it should take housekeeping to complete their rounds the next day. I would print it all out, put it in an envelope, and draw a quick cartoon on it so the manager had something to smile about when she came in the next morning.
The whole process took about 90 minutes. 6.5 more hours to fill.
I would restock the towels in the various places you would expect to find towels in a hotel. The complimentary coffee station was always covered in hot chocolate powder and creamer that had been drying since that morning. While cleaning it, I would always brew a new pot. I usually stuck to tea, but it wasn’t uncommon to have a police officer swing by on patrol and fill up their thermos. That fresh pot of coffee came in handy more than once.
Once, I spent most of my night arguing with a woman through the intercom as she pounded on the locked sliding door. It was around 1 in the morning and she was convinced her husband was upstairs cheating on her. She might have been right. That kind of thing happened frequently. I couldn’t and wasn’t going to open the door and let her find out; Not without back up, anyway. I left her alone long enough to start the coffee.
On another occasion, the sliding door wasn’t even locked, that man was simply moving too fast. The door didn’t have time to slide out of his way and he nocked it off its track. I spent an hour trying to figure out how to turn it off so that it would stop closing halfway, getting misaligned, opening back up, and repeating.
I got called to a newlywed couple’s room because they thought someone had been sleeping in their bed. I loaded up fresh sheets from the basement, took them to the suite on the top floor, only to discover they simply didn’t recognize turndown service. Not wanting an argument, I remade the bed anyway.
There was Rachel, the 2nd shift clerk I usually took over for. There were weekends when everyone else cashed in vacation, leaving Rachel and me as the only non-housekeeping staff for 48 hours. Rachel and I knew we were the ones to hold the building up when nobody else wanted to be there. There’s an immediate camaraderie in that kind of relationship. I could always count on Rachel.
I’m not sure what my point is with this nostalgic reflection except to say, I loved it. I’m not sure I didn’t flirt with insanity from chaotic sleep and dramatic shifts in activity, but that prepared me for the chaos of being a parent. Maybe my daughter singing for more hours than sleeping last night jogged my memory.
