If you pay any attention to the side bar of the blog, you will have already noticed the "Fake Names" section listing the motels I've worked at, under false names, along with the dates that I've worked there. You may also have noticed that the Gary Carter Express Inn has three different sets of dates with it. You'll also notice that I only worked at El Crapface Lodge for one day. Let me explain:
After working almost a year at the Pretty Good Inn, I left Lethbridge to work in Fort MacMurray, Alberta for a lawn care company. It was just a temporary job for the busy spring clean-up season. The reason I took the job up north was two-fold: it paid better, and I needed to hit the reset button on my social life. So when I was done with that job, and with a brief stay in Edmonton working for my sister, I returned to Lethbridge in August of 2003. I didn't want to go back to the Pretty Good Inn, so I sent resumes to several motels and hotels in town. None of those businesses were the Gary Carter Express Inn. I got two interviews. The first was at the Adlaw Inn (yes, that's another fake name), but they told me in the interview that they were hiring for the Gary Carter as well, since it was owned by the same guy. The second interview was at the El Crapface. I was pretty much offered the job at El Crapface immediately, and I accepted. My one shift (the 3-11 babysitter shift) didn't impress me at all. The lobby smelled like cigarette smoke. That was the first red flag. The next thing that alarmed me was a tour of the premises. The place was a run-down, smelly dump. The third strike against them was the fact that I wasn't allowed to sit down for the entirety of the 8-hour shift. Now, I know there are a lot of jobs that require the employees to stand the whole time. I've worked some of those jobs, and some of you are probably calling me a baby even as I type this (how you're reading it while I type it is a mystery, but I stand by my statement). But let me tell you about the hospitality industry, especially the cheaper properties. You work in little spurts, for the most part. You can go an eight hour shift and do as little as a half hour of actual work. You're mostly there to hold down the fort and be available for anyone who needs you. Every other motel I've worked in has allowed me to sit when I wasn't dealing with any guests. This one shift I spent at the El Crapface Lodge was spent leaning against a wall or a counter while my legs gradually got more and more sore, followed by a 45-minute walk home when I was done. (I had recently killed my car.)
The day after I worked my first shift at the El Crapface, I got a call from the Gary Carter Express offering me a job there. I took the job, and called the manager at El Crapface as soon as I got off the phone with the Gary Carter to quit.
The Gary Carter is the smallest of the four motels that I've worked at, with only 37 rooms. At first, I worked the morning shift from 7 until 3. It was a pretty good deal. I checked everyone out and ran the continental breakfast, and then I had four hours to do whatever the heck I wanted to. It was also a 30-minute walk from my apartment instead of 45. For that first two-year period, I worked every shift at one point or another. I spent quite a bit of time working the night shift, which was easy most days. There were nights that I didn't see a single soul for the entire shift. Not even a phone call. There was a cot in the back office for some reason, and I'm ashamed to admit that I would sometimes take a 45-minute nap at around 3:00 in the morning. After a year or so, the owner switched me back to the morning shift and made me the front desk supervisor. The turnover in motels is high, and I was by far the senior employee by this point. The problem with the promotion was that the owner - a Korean gentleman who didn't speak English very well - would often get me to do his dirty work. This soured my attitude towards the job. It didn't help the the owner had a bad temper. One day, after making me screw over a guest for $65 extra dollars, I gave my two-weeks notice, and shortly thereafter started working at the Birch Lodge.
I absolutely hated the Birch Lodge, but stuck with it for two years to put myself through college while my wife was on maternity leave. During those two years, the owner of the Gary Carter sold the motel to another Korean guy, this one much more pleasant than the first. My cousin, who I had hired a few months before I left the Gary Carter, had moved up the ladder to become the front desk supervisor himself. He called me up one day and, with the permission of the new owner, offered me a job back at the Gary Carter making $0.50/hour more than I was making at the Birch Lodge. I jumped on that like a fat kid on a Smartie. I gave my notice at the Birch and was working the babysitter shift back at the Gary Carter two weeks later.
I graduated from college with a management diploma in December of 2007. I applied for a paid internship in Municipal Administration, and I left the Gary Carter and Lethbridge behind in April 2008 to go to central Alberta to work for two small urban municipalities for a year. It was a start at a real, decent-paying career. After my internship was up, I got a job as the Assistant Administrator in the town of Picture Butte, which is where I still live today. I still live there, but I only worked there for five months. I grew to hate the sound of my boss's voice and started avoiding her, which ultimately led to me being fired for lack of communication. I spent a year on Employment Insurance, trying my hands at a couple of commission-only sales jobs that went nowhere because I'm a god-awful salesman. I'm pretty sure I was legitimately a little bit insane during this year. After my third child was born, and as the EI was nearing its end, I swallowed my pride and went back to the Gary Carter Express to ask if they had any openings. The second owner, Jin, had always liked me, so he hired me back as soon as I asked. And I've been here ever since, working the babysitter shift for two years now since returning. Jin sold the place back in August, but the new owner kept me on, and there's no end in sight. No end at all.
Oh God, I need to write a novel and sell it to a publisher.
Thursday, October 25, 2012
Sunday, October 21, 2012
Don't Book Online, You Foolish People!
So, yeah. The title really hits my point home there. Maybe booking online gets you sweet deals at big, expensive hotels and resorts, but booking online at small hotels and motels is the wrong thing to do. You don't believe me, though. I'm always telling people this, and they never believe me.
Prepaid reservations are the worst, but I'll get to them later. I've only had to start dealing with them in the past two months. I'll start with booking online without paying for it at the time the reservation is made (ie. you're paying the motel when you check in instead of paying the website when you book the room). In my ten years of experience, if there's a screw-up with a reservation, it's an Internet booking 9 times out of 10, especially if you book through a third-party website instead of the chain's brand website. The people you're making the reservation with through websites have never set foot on the premises of the motel you're staying at, and there's a good chance they've never even been to the city that you're visiting. All they have is a list of room codes and the number of how many are available. Most properties use a standardized coding system, but there are a few variations that differ from site-to-site. This can lead to confusion, such as asking for a non-smoking room and ending up with a smoking room instead. Pet rooms is an issue, too. Websites advertise us here at the Gary Carter Express Inn as being pet-friendly. By that, we mean we have two rooms out of 37 that we allow pets in. Nobody knows this except for the handful of people who actually work here at the motel. Expedia.com, Hotels.com, even garycarter.com, would book pets into all 37 of our rooms on the same day if the costumers asked. And I'll tell you right now, there's no way in hell (unless it's a service animal) you're taking a pet into our honeymoon suites.
There's also a decent chance that you're paying a higher rate for your online reservation than you would have if you had called us directly and made a reservation with us. These websites have to make money, and they do that by charging us a commission, which increases the rate that you're paying.
Sometimes the third party booking agent will completely screw up and book you a reservation at the wrong motel. People will show up in Lethbridge looking for their reservation, and we won't have any record of it. After some sleuthing, we'll discover that their reservation is at the Gary Carter in Red Deer or Medicine Hat.
Now let me talk about prepaid reservations. I've never had to deal much with these until the new manager here contacted the major travel websites and set up the option for guests to pay the website, and then the website, in turn, would pay us. (Do I even need to explain that the rate you pay the website is higher than what they pay us? That's obvious, right?) My biggest complaint with prepaids, however, is not the websites but the guests. There are three things that they can't seem to understand: 1) they can't show up and cancel the reservation because we're not as nice as they thought we were; 2) they can't make any changes at all to the reservation (change it from one bed to two, for example); and 3) they don't get a receipt from us. The basic answer to all three is "You've already paid for the room." If you want to cancel the room, you have to contact the website or travel agent you booked it through (ie. the company you gave your money to), and you have to do it 24 hours in advance. You can't add more beds, more people, or upgrade to a suite because you've already paid for the single, and the computer makes it physically impossible for me to make any of those changes. And you don't get a receipt from me because you didn't give me any effing money. I suppose I could print you off a blank receipt, but what good is that going to be to anyone?
I'm writing about this today, because I had two prepaid reservations check in within five minutes of each other, and both of them annoyed me. The first was a man in his late 60s or early 70s who walked in and, without telling me that he already had a reservation, asked me what our senior rates were. I quoted him our rates, and then he pulled out the confirmation page from his prepaid reservation and said, "My grandson said this was the best way to do it, but he was wrong. Can you give me the rate you just quoted?" The reservation quoted a rate $10 more expensive than I had quoted him. I would have liked to change the rate to give the guy a break, but he had already paid for the room, and it wasn't us that he had paid for it. I can't refund money that he didn't give to me. The second reservation was for one queen-sized bed for one person. The mother of the guest showed up (he was in his late teens) walked in with him and asked for a room with two beds instead, which costs more money. But again, she had already paid a third-party website for a single room, and the computer would not allow me to change it to a double, so she and her son are sharing a bed tonight.
So, in summary, more mistakes happen when you add a third, uneducated party dealing with hundreds or thousands of properties; prepaying severely limits your options for any last-minute changes; and prepaid guests are stupid.
Prepaid reservations are the worst, but I'll get to them later. I've only had to start dealing with them in the past two months. I'll start with booking online without paying for it at the time the reservation is made (ie. you're paying the motel when you check in instead of paying the website when you book the room). In my ten years of experience, if there's a screw-up with a reservation, it's an Internet booking 9 times out of 10, especially if you book through a third-party website instead of the chain's brand website. The people you're making the reservation with through websites have never set foot on the premises of the motel you're staying at, and there's a good chance they've never even been to the city that you're visiting. All they have is a list of room codes and the number of how many are available. Most properties use a standardized coding system, but there are a few variations that differ from site-to-site. This can lead to confusion, such as asking for a non-smoking room and ending up with a smoking room instead. Pet rooms is an issue, too. Websites advertise us here at the Gary Carter Express Inn as being pet-friendly. By that, we mean we have two rooms out of 37 that we allow pets in. Nobody knows this except for the handful of people who actually work here at the motel. Expedia.com, Hotels.com, even garycarter.com, would book pets into all 37 of our rooms on the same day if the costumers asked. And I'll tell you right now, there's no way in hell (unless it's a service animal) you're taking a pet into our honeymoon suites.
There's also a decent chance that you're paying a higher rate for your online reservation than you would have if you had called us directly and made a reservation with us. These websites have to make money, and they do that by charging us a commission, which increases the rate that you're paying.
Sometimes the third party booking agent will completely screw up and book you a reservation at the wrong motel. People will show up in Lethbridge looking for their reservation, and we won't have any record of it. After some sleuthing, we'll discover that their reservation is at the Gary Carter in Red Deer or Medicine Hat.
Now let me talk about prepaid reservations. I've never had to deal much with these until the new manager here contacted the major travel websites and set up the option for guests to pay the website, and then the website, in turn, would pay us. (Do I even need to explain that the rate you pay the website is higher than what they pay us? That's obvious, right?) My biggest complaint with prepaids, however, is not the websites but the guests. There are three things that they can't seem to understand: 1) they can't show up and cancel the reservation because we're not as nice as they thought we were; 2) they can't make any changes at all to the reservation (change it from one bed to two, for example); and 3) they don't get a receipt from us. The basic answer to all three is "You've already paid for the room." If you want to cancel the room, you have to contact the website or travel agent you booked it through (ie. the company you gave your money to), and you have to do it 24 hours in advance. You can't add more beds, more people, or upgrade to a suite because you've already paid for the single, and the computer makes it physically impossible for me to make any of those changes. And you don't get a receipt from me because you didn't give me any effing money. I suppose I could print you off a blank receipt, but what good is that going to be to anyone?
I'm writing about this today, because I had two prepaid reservations check in within five minutes of each other, and both of them annoyed me. The first was a man in his late 60s or early 70s who walked in and, without telling me that he already had a reservation, asked me what our senior rates were. I quoted him our rates, and then he pulled out the confirmation page from his prepaid reservation and said, "My grandson said this was the best way to do it, but he was wrong. Can you give me the rate you just quoted?" The reservation quoted a rate $10 more expensive than I had quoted him. I would have liked to change the rate to give the guy a break, but he had already paid for the room, and it wasn't us that he had paid for it. I can't refund money that he didn't give to me. The second reservation was for one queen-sized bed for one person. The mother of the guest showed up (he was in his late teens) walked in with him and asked for a room with two beds instead, which costs more money. But again, she had already paid a third-party website for a single room, and the computer would not allow me to change it to a double, so she and her son are sharing a bed tonight.
So, in summary, more mistakes happen when you add a third, uneducated party dealing with hundreds or thousands of properties; prepaying severely limits your options for any last-minute changes; and prepaid guests are stupid.
Saturday, October 6, 2012
Finally, Some Recognition!
Two weeks ago, my sister, Jenny, phoned me and told me about a radio show on CBC Radio 1 that was asking for pitches for an episode of their show dealing with jobs. Specifically, the moment that you realized you either loved or hated your job. Since my current project was this blog and my related twitter feed (@hyperferrianism), she figured it was right up my alley. The show is called Definitely Not The Opera, or DNTO for short, hosted by Sook-Yin Lee. I watched a lot of Much Music in the '90s, so I'm familiar with Sook-Yin. My sister had also been on the show a bunch of times over the years, so I listen to the show pretty much every week on my way to work. So I wrote a pitch about the moment I realized that I hated working at the Birch Lodge and sent it off the next morning, which is when the deadline was. They e-mailed me back the next day and said they loved my pitch, and I talked to a producer on the phone the day after that, and I was in a CBC studio in Calgary that Friday recording the story. They also accepted Jenn's pitch, so we were both on the same episode. That episode aired this afternoon. My story was the lead, which was really cool.
While it's easily the most interesting event that has happened to me in my years in the hospitality industry, I haven't yet told it on this blog because I couldn't think of a way to make it funny, and humour is the main goal of this blog. You can listen to the story in the DNTO episode, but I'm going to retell it here, too. I wrote this a couple of years ago, but I've updated it slightly (changed the actual hotel name to Birch Lodge, updated my current age). It's not funny, but it goes into a lot more detail of the event, plus I analyze my reaction and feelings about it. Enjoy:
I arrived at work 15 minutes before my shift actually started, as is my habit, and found the girl working the 3-11 shift before me (Shaylene was her name) trying to solve a problem with her cash-out. I was somewhat of an old hand at this, and I quickly helped her find it and sat down in a chair off to the side while she finished counting the float and preparing her deposit at a work desk located on the back wall behind the front desk.
Shaylene’s friend, who had been there keeping her company during a relatively slow shift, was there with us, and we all chatted amicably while Shaylene counted out the money to deposit into the safe.
The chair I was seated in was situated in a place that was hidden from the front door by the pay phone alcove, so when the door opened, the woman who came in couldn’t see me and I couldn’t see her. She started yelling at Shaylene and her friend as she completely ignored me. I didn’t understand what the woman said, and I initially thought that it was someone who knew the two other girls and was either fooling around with them or was pissed off by something trivial. Shaylene’s friend—whose name I forget—had been standing in the lobby in front of the desk. Once the new arrival started yelling, she dashed around the side of the desk and hid on the floor. That was when I realized something was not normal, and the woman who had just arrived (Danielle) stepped further into the lobby, and I saw a pistol held in her outstretched arm pointing at Shaylene. She held out an orange canvas lunch bag in the other hand and demanded that Shaylene fill it with cash.
There was a split second in which rage tried to drive me to action, but something else more sensible took hold instead. All emotion accept for a sense of urgency seemed to drain out of me as I jumped to my feet. Shaylene’s reaction to the robber’s demand was to throw the deposit money, which happened to be in her hand already, on the front desk and duck behind the counter. Danielle could see the till drawer full of $600 in cash sitting on the work desk, so Shaylene’s hasty offering of $250 wasn’t enough to get Danielle to leave. She seemed surprised to see me stand up. The gun swiveled to point at me instead of at Shaylene, and I was ordered to fill the lunch bag. I took it from her and turned to the work desk.
I quickly began emptying the cash drawer of all of the bills: hundreds, fifties, twenties, tens, fives. As soon as my back was turned to Danielle and her gun, I heard the front door open, and a man joined Danielle in yelling and cursing at me to hurry. They crammed a lot of profanity and urgings to move faster in the five or ten seconds it took me to fill the bag. I distinctly remember the man saying, “Do you wanna get shot, you fat fuck?”
Once I was done shoving the paper money into the sac, I grabbed a handful of toonies and dumped them in, and then started scooping up the loonies. “That’s enough,” the impatient robbers ordered, followed by an expletive-rich demand to hand over the money. I turned around and handed them the sac with my head bowed in a show of utter meekness. It was as if they were wild dogs, and I was afraid that eye contact would be interpreted as a challenge, which would be met with brutal violence. Even as they took the lunch bag out of my hand, I started to kneel down behind the desk. “Get down on the floor!” Danielle and her male companion ordered.
“I am,” I said evenly. They were the only two words I spoke during the whole ordeal.
“Don’t touch the phone!” they ordered as I heard them open the door.
After the robbers fled, Shaylene, her friend, and I stared at each other in wide-eyed shock. “Did that just happen?” I asked.
I called 911, even though Shaylene was apprehensive about touching the phone after being ordered not to. As I hung up, a motel guest came in the lobby and found the three of us kneeling on the floor behind the desk. He was a young guy who had been flirting with Shaylene earlier, and they were supposed to go out for drinks, but Shaylene explained what had happened and cancelled the date. The police showed up just a couple minutes after I called them, and Danielle was apprehended within 15 minutes. The gun turned out to be fake, but we didn’t know that while it was pointed at our faces.
I always tell this story as if it’s something cool that happened to me at work once. And it is an interesting story that filled my dull job with a few minutes of excitement. I never really let on that the incident had a profound effect on me.
All my life, I have avoided violence. Not violence in movies, video games, and literature. That’s fake violence, which is fun. I enjoy R-rated movies and M-rated video games. It’s real violence that I find so disturbing. In elementary school, I was terrified of bullies, even though they rarely picked on me, and even forged somewhat of a shaky friendship with me at times. Nothing terrified me more than the possibility of being punched, especially in the face. The combination of avoiding violence and not being a nerd (that came later in life) made it possible to get through childhood without ever getting into a fist fight. Once I was a teenager, it was my uncanny ability to disappear into the background that kept me flying under the radar of most bullies, and the ones who did notice me relied on psychological bullying rather than throwing punches. As an adult, I generally don’t put myself in situations that I might have to punch my way out of, and I don’t hang around with people who will get me into that kind of trouble.
So here I am, 34 years old, and I’ve never punched a human being. I’ve never been punched, either. I still have the deep-seeded aversion to real life violence. It’s not just pain-avoidance, either. I have experienced a lot of physical pain in my life, from my son head-butting me in the teeth, to kidney stone attacks, to ingrown toenail surgery with no anesthetic, to a broken jaw. I have developed a respectable tolerance to pain, so it’s not the potential pain from a punch to the eye could cause that makes me afraid of violence. It’s more the idea of one person wanting to inflict pain on another person for no good reason that disturbs me. The primal urge to damage another person, to make him bleed.
Imagine how someone so terrified of being punched would feel with a gun shoved in his face.
It was 11:00 at night. Two people with at least one gun. (I never did see the guy, so I don’t know if he was armed or not. More on that later.) My only potential allies were two skinny 19-year-old girls who were quivering on the floor. This may sound cliché, but I could feel the gun pointing at my back as I filled the lunch bag with money and wondered if I’d ever see my newborn son again.
Shaylene took two weeks off after the robbery. She came back for one shift, during which she jumped in fear every time the door opened. She quit the next day. I, on the other hand, worked my entire eight-hour shift immediately after being robbed, and was back the next day for more.
Besides my ever-present fear of violence, something else disturbs me about that night. Who the hell was the guy who came in and supported Danielle while I emptied the till? My theory was that they were either working together, or he was her pimp or something. She would come in yelling and waving the gun around, get the employees to hand over the cash, and he would watch outside to make sure no one came in behind Danielle and to come in to assist if it looked like she needed it. When they approached the Birch Lodge, they didn’t realize I was there because I was sitting out of sight. Once I stood up to come to Shaylene’s aid, he realized that Danielle, who was no more than 100 pounds and armed with a fake gun, was up against a 250-pound man, and he came to back her up. This theory is very probable, and I would be surprised if reality proved to vary much from it. There’s something that has been nagging me for the past six years, though.
Does the guy even exist?
He came into the lobby while my back was turned. When I turned back to hand Danielle the money, my eyes were cast down, and my only visual memory of him is a dark shadow on the very edge of my peripheral vision. The only real memory I have of him is his voice.
When Danielle robbed a Mohawk gas station a few days before paying me a visit, there was no report of a male accomplice.
When Danielle was arrested, she insisted that she worked alone on both robberies.
Strangest of all, though, is that Shaylene and her friend don’t remember a guy being there at all. They never saw him, and they say they never heard him.
Were Shaylene and her friend so panicked that they didn’t notice a second, much deeper and forceful voice threatening to shoot us? When we were talking to the police, they recounted some of the things Danielle said, so they were coherent through the ordeal. Why wouldn’t they have noticed a second voice?
Did I imagine the guy? Was he some sort of hallucination? Why would my mind deal with being robbed by creating a second robber to yell at me? Maybe, deep down inside, I’m sexist, and can’t bare the humiliation of being robbed by a woman, so my subconscious created an imposing male to go along with the crack-whore with the gun.
In some of my more ridiculous moments, I wonder if I was hearing the devil urging Danielle on. Either that, or a foul-mouthed angel trying to make sure I didn’t do anything foolish. That is obviously not what happened, but there’s a small irrational part of me that clings to that.
But, as I said, I’m sure my mystery robber exists. So he’s still out there. And Danielle is out of prison by now. And I still work evenings at a motel.
While it's easily the most interesting event that has happened to me in my years in the hospitality industry, I haven't yet told it on this blog because I couldn't think of a way to make it funny, and humour is the main goal of this blog. You can listen to the story in the DNTO episode, but I'm going to retell it here, too. I wrote this a couple of years ago, but I've updated it slightly (changed the actual hotel name to Birch Lodge, updated my current age). It's not funny, but it goes into a lot more detail of the event, plus I analyze my reaction and feelings about it. Enjoy:
I arrived at work 15 minutes before my shift actually started, as is my habit, and found the girl working the 3-11 shift before me (Shaylene was her name) trying to solve a problem with her cash-out. I was somewhat of an old hand at this, and I quickly helped her find it and sat down in a chair off to the side while she finished counting the float and preparing her deposit at a work desk located on the back wall behind the front desk.
Shaylene’s friend, who had been there keeping her company during a relatively slow shift, was there with us, and we all chatted amicably while Shaylene counted out the money to deposit into the safe.
The chair I was seated in was situated in a place that was hidden from the front door by the pay phone alcove, so when the door opened, the woman who came in couldn’t see me and I couldn’t see her. She started yelling at Shaylene and her friend as she completely ignored me. I didn’t understand what the woman said, and I initially thought that it was someone who knew the two other girls and was either fooling around with them or was pissed off by something trivial. Shaylene’s friend—whose name I forget—had been standing in the lobby in front of the desk. Once the new arrival started yelling, she dashed around the side of the desk and hid on the floor. That was when I realized something was not normal, and the woman who had just arrived (Danielle) stepped further into the lobby, and I saw a pistol held in her outstretched arm pointing at Shaylene. She held out an orange canvas lunch bag in the other hand and demanded that Shaylene fill it with cash.
There was a split second in which rage tried to drive me to action, but something else more sensible took hold instead. All emotion accept for a sense of urgency seemed to drain out of me as I jumped to my feet. Shaylene’s reaction to the robber’s demand was to throw the deposit money, which happened to be in her hand already, on the front desk and duck behind the counter. Danielle could see the till drawer full of $600 in cash sitting on the work desk, so Shaylene’s hasty offering of $250 wasn’t enough to get Danielle to leave. She seemed surprised to see me stand up. The gun swiveled to point at me instead of at Shaylene, and I was ordered to fill the lunch bag. I took it from her and turned to the work desk.
I quickly began emptying the cash drawer of all of the bills: hundreds, fifties, twenties, tens, fives. As soon as my back was turned to Danielle and her gun, I heard the front door open, and a man joined Danielle in yelling and cursing at me to hurry. They crammed a lot of profanity and urgings to move faster in the five or ten seconds it took me to fill the bag. I distinctly remember the man saying, “Do you wanna get shot, you fat fuck?”
Once I was done shoving the paper money into the sac, I grabbed a handful of toonies and dumped them in, and then started scooping up the loonies. “That’s enough,” the impatient robbers ordered, followed by an expletive-rich demand to hand over the money. I turned around and handed them the sac with my head bowed in a show of utter meekness. It was as if they were wild dogs, and I was afraid that eye contact would be interpreted as a challenge, which would be met with brutal violence. Even as they took the lunch bag out of my hand, I started to kneel down behind the desk. “Get down on the floor!” Danielle and her male companion ordered.
“I am,” I said evenly. They were the only two words I spoke during the whole ordeal.
“Don’t touch the phone!” they ordered as I heard them open the door.
After the robbers fled, Shaylene, her friend, and I stared at each other in wide-eyed shock. “Did that just happen?” I asked.
I called 911, even though Shaylene was apprehensive about touching the phone after being ordered not to. As I hung up, a motel guest came in the lobby and found the three of us kneeling on the floor behind the desk. He was a young guy who had been flirting with Shaylene earlier, and they were supposed to go out for drinks, but Shaylene explained what had happened and cancelled the date. The police showed up just a couple minutes after I called them, and Danielle was apprehended within 15 minutes. The gun turned out to be fake, but we didn’t know that while it was pointed at our faces.
I always tell this story as if it’s something cool that happened to me at work once. And it is an interesting story that filled my dull job with a few minutes of excitement. I never really let on that the incident had a profound effect on me.
All my life, I have avoided violence. Not violence in movies, video games, and literature. That’s fake violence, which is fun. I enjoy R-rated movies and M-rated video games. It’s real violence that I find so disturbing. In elementary school, I was terrified of bullies, even though they rarely picked on me, and even forged somewhat of a shaky friendship with me at times. Nothing terrified me more than the possibility of being punched, especially in the face. The combination of avoiding violence and not being a nerd (that came later in life) made it possible to get through childhood without ever getting into a fist fight. Once I was a teenager, it was my uncanny ability to disappear into the background that kept me flying under the radar of most bullies, and the ones who did notice me relied on psychological bullying rather than throwing punches. As an adult, I generally don’t put myself in situations that I might have to punch my way out of, and I don’t hang around with people who will get me into that kind of trouble.
So here I am, 34 years old, and I’ve never punched a human being. I’ve never been punched, either. I still have the deep-seeded aversion to real life violence. It’s not just pain-avoidance, either. I have experienced a lot of physical pain in my life, from my son head-butting me in the teeth, to kidney stone attacks, to ingrown toenail surgery with no anesthetic, to a broken jaw. I have developed a respectable tolerance to pain, so it’s not the potential pain from a punch to the eye could cause that makes me afraid of violence. It’s more the idea of one person wanting to inflict pain on another person for no good reason that disturbs me. The primal urge to damage another person, to make him bleed.
Imagine how someone so terrified of being punched would feel with a gun shoved in his face.
It was 11:00 at night. Two people with at least one gun. (I never did see the guy, so I don’t know if he was armed or not. More on that later.) My only potential allies were two skinny 19-year-old girls who were quivering on the floor. This may sound cliché, but I could feel the gun pointing at my back as I filled the lunch bag with money and wondered if I’d ever see my newborn son again.
Shaylene took two weeks off after the robbery. She came back for one shift, during which she jumped in fear every time the door opened. She quit the next day. I, on the other hand, worked my entire eight-hour shift immediately after being robbed, and was back the next day for more.
Besides my ever-present fear of violence, something else disturbs me about that night. Who the hell was the guy who came in and supported Danielle while I emptied the till? My theory was that they were either working together, or he was her pimp or something. She would come in yelling and waving the gun around, get the employees to hand over the cash, and he would watch outside to make sure no one came in behind Danielle and to come in to assist if it looked like she needed it. When they approached the Birch Lodge, they didn’t realize I was there because I was sitting out of sight. Once I stood up to come to Shaylene’s aid, he realized that Danielle, who was no more than 100 pounds and armed with a fake gun, was up against a 250-pound man, and he came to back her up. This theory is very probable, and I would be surprised if reality proved to vary much from it. There’s something that has been nagging me for the past six years, though.
Does the guy even exist?
He came into the lobby while my back was turned. When I turned back to hand Danielle the money, my eyes were cast down, and my only visual memory of him is a dark shadow on the very edge of my peripheral vision. The only real memory I have of him is his voice.
When Danielle robbed a Mohawk gas station a few days before paying me a visit, there was no report of a male accomplice.
When Danielle was arrested, she insisted that she worked alone on both robberies.
Strangest of all, though, is that Shaylene and her friend don’t remember a guy being there at all. They never saw him, and they say they never heard him.
Were Shaylene and her friend so panicked that they didn’t notice a second, much deeper and forceful voice threatening to shoot us? When we were talking to the police, they recounted some of the things Danielle said, so they were coherent through the ordeal. Why wouldn’t they have noticed a second voice?
Did I imagine the guy? Was he some sort of hallucination? Why would my mind deal with being robbed by creating a second robber to yell at me? Maybe, deep down inside, I’m sexist, and can’t bare the humiliation of being robbed by a woman, so my subconscious created an imposing male to go along with the crack-whore with the gun.
In some of my more ridiculous moments, I wonder if I was hearing the devil urging Danielle on. Either that, or a foul-mouthed angel trying to make sure I didn’t do anything foolish. That is obviously not what happened, but there’s a small irrational part of me that clings to that.
But, as I said, I’m sure my mystery robber exists. So he’s still out there. And Danielle is out of prison by now. And I still work evenings at a motel.
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