A vague memory of Mom in my closet that day after the sex toy shop in Northampton. J?
Oh. My stomach roils.
J for Jason. Mom got me one with a D on it, too. I crane my neck, twisting around, eyes on the ground. Where’s that one? If one vibrator magically appears in my bag, I’m sure there are more.
“I’ve seen some crazy tips before, but…” Guido jokes. I shove the damn vibrator in my bag and decide that the best way to handle this with grace and dignity is to walk away without another word.
“I hope your stay is a pleasant one, Ms. Jacoby! You can believe all the buzz about The Fort,” he says as I walk away. I swear he winks. And in the recesses of my professional mind I think:
Reminded me to have a pleasant stay? Check.
Sigh.
Chapter Fourteen
Another valet, Mike, removes my luggage from the trunk of my car and escorts me into the lobby. “Lobby” is an understatement.
The first wonder of the modern world is more like it. Grey Industries couldn’t come up with something this fine if they tried. I can tell James McCormick has stamped his touch on this place in the most subtle of ways, from the enormous Persian rug that covers a quarter of the lobby to the old world map imprinted in the arched ceiling, a deep cupola made of highly polished oak and bronze highlights screaming with his style. It looks just like his office at Anterdec Insustries.
All of the lights are dimmed, with sunshine from the skylight adding just enough to make the lobby ethereal. I feel like I’m in a steampunk mystery, the blend of old-world flavor and modern technology so exquisite I could be in a slightly different dimension, couldn’t I? Just tilted enough to be between two possibilities.
Check-in goes smoothly—Mike disappears with my luggage—and I’m assigned to room 1416, which means climbing into one of the elevators of doom. You know the kind. Major hotels have them. You punch in your floor number and the smart elevator system tells you which one to go on. Inside, there is no panel of numbers for floors, because the system is designed to assume that you are a pathetic, stupid human with inferior reasoning skills, and that the engineers (almost all male) who designed the system are smarter than you.
Which means that if you get on the elevator and a harassing ass**le is on with you, you’re stuck in elevator purgatory until the Machine of Superior Intellect decides to spring you out of your misogynistic prison.
I ascend to the fourteenth floor without incident, noting the condition of all the common areas (pristine), then enter my room. The bed is covered with fine chocolates from a Swiss company that uses slave-free chocolate, and the towels are twisted to form a gorgeous rendering of the Mona Lisa in 3D.
I plop my carryon on the bed, and the valet has already delivered my rolling bag. One of the first steps I take in any hotel room I enter is to check out the balcony, if there is one. The thick black-out curtains take some serious muscle to pull apart, but the work is worth it. A stunning view of the city rolls out before me. Opening the sliding glass doors, I let the wind whip through my hair and carry my worries away.
A gentle knock at the door compels me to open it. Mike is standing there, smiling. He looks nothing like Guido, and resembles Merry the Hobbit mostly.
“Everything to your liking, Ms. Jacoby?”
I know the drill. I slip him a five and assure him all is well. He tips his hat to me and walks calmly down the hall.
My nineteen-page (nineteen-page!) list of instructions for the twenty-seven-page evaluation tells me exactly what to do for the night I’m here. If you mystery shop a lower-market chain of hotels you typically get your room free, about $25 in pay, and reimbursement for one dinner and a tip for housekeeping.
This place involves:
Valet parking
Tipping the bellhop
Drinks in the bar (two, minimum)
A full dinner from room service, from appetizer to entree to dessert
Breakfast buffet in the morning
Housekeeping tip
A massage in the spa
Tipping the bellhop on check out
Valet parking tip upon checkout
This is how the other half lives? If so, how do I join them?
But that’s not all.
Like relationships, you learn way more about customer service by testing them via problems. Any hotel or restaurant can run smoothly when it’s quiet, when they’re fully staffed, and when nothing’s gone wrong.
The true test of a business is how its employees react to crisis.
Even manufactured crisis.
And my job is to manufacture a series of them, starting with the bathroom. I read the instructions, which were written by Amanda:
Facilities and Engineering: Create a problem with a fixture in the bathroom, a problem great enough to require a service call from one of our facilities workers. For instance, separate the chain from the ball in the toilet tank, or remove the nut that secures to one of the bolts on the underside of the toilet seat. Tuck the loose nut under the wastebasket.
The goal is to test the friendliness of the front-desk clerk, the response time of the facilities worker, and whether their service is friendly and efficient.
Okay. Standard operating procedure for a hotel mystery shop. I’ve done this tons of times before. My old standby is a little more creative than these suggestions, for I typically just make it so the toilet handle doesn’t connect to the flushing mechanism.
Easy peasy.
I make the call first, eager to get this out of the way so I can move on to drinking at the bar…er, to the next task for my job. The hotel has an ice bar—an entire nightclub carved out of ice. The hotel desk clerk (Celeste) takes my call in stride, apologizes for the inconvenience, and at 3:56 p.m. promises that someone from their maintenance department will respond within ten minutes.
Great. I have ten minutes to break something. I’m Shannon; how hard can that be?
Something buzzes in the next room. My phone. I search the room and my eyes locate it, but it’s not lit up. No text.
Bzzzzz.
Weird. What could be buzzing like that?
My carryon starts to move of its own accord, edging toward the end of the bed. I open it and—
A giant, carved J stares at me. It’s pink.
Oh, yes.
Mom’s Special Surprise.
The Power button appears to be jammed, and no matter how hard I try, I can’t get it to pop up and stop vibrating. My fingers worry the little button, and in frustration I bang it—hard—against the edge of the desk.
BZZZZZZZZZZZ.
I appear to have whacked it into hyperdrive. If it were the Millennium Falcon then Chewbacca would be turning all the thrusters on for Han Solo.
That sounds soooo dirty.