Confessions of a Hotel Insider

I’ve worked in hotels for more than a decade. I’ve checked you in, checked you out, oriented you to the property, served you a beverage, separated your white panties from the white bed sheets, parked your car, tasted your room service (before and, sadly, after), cleaned your toilet, denied you a late checkout, given you a wake-up call, eaten M&M’s out of your minibar, laughed at your jokes, and taken your money. From New Orleans to New York, I’ve played by hotel rules and, in the process, learned every aspect of the industry. Due to the fact that I just don’t care anymore, I will now offer easy and never-publicized tips and tricks…

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If I put you in room 1212 in New York City, your phone will not stop ringing with wrong numbers. Why? Well, a surprising number of guests never seem to learn that you have to dial 9 to make an outside call. So all day and, believe me, all night, idiots dispersed throughout the building will pick up their phones and try to straight dial a local number, starting with 1-212. Whatever they press after that matters not because they have already dialed room 1212, and 1212’s guest will constantly pick up the 3:00 a.m. call and hear the loud mashing of other numbers or some drunk guest saying, “Hello? Hello? Who is this?”

He’s right.   It’s why (back in the day) when installing a new phone system I’d recommend not using the digit “1” as the leading digit of the internal extension number. Anyone who forgot to dial “9” first, or any other digit used for identifying outgoing calls, would often match an internal phone extension.  Now I once had a customer up in Concord NH. Two hour drive with tolls. We had two technicians up there five times on the compliant that one guys extension kept ringing and when he answered he couldn’t talk to the caller, he just got “funny” noises in his ear. The problem always went away before our tech could get up there, but re-occurred several times a week. I worked remotely as an engineer and always got the crazy problems. When the service manager for that region got tired of sending techs on a wild goose chase and hearing from the irate customer (Concord PD, did I mention that? I hate angry customers with guns.) He gave the problem to me.

I monitored the poor guys phone, setting up a trace and watched his sets activity until I saw it start ringing, then examined the source of the call. The guy had my number and called to tell me that he had just had one of those calls.  The call had come from an inside extension, a analog phone (what we call the same type of phone service that we all used to get from the Bell system, in business phone systems these are used for elevator phones, modems and FAXES).   It turned out that the line calling him was a fax line and an idiot had been dialing another fax machine but didn’t realize that the line he was using was a internal line and needed a “9” for all calls. The number he dialed matched the internal extension, the fax upon completion of dialing began sending the fax recognition tones (the funny noises) when no answering tones were received the machine, as programed, hung up, and re-tried the call ten times for the next hour.  Since it was user error, I told the SM that he could bill for all the other service calls. He declined, something about customers with guns.

Scary Stuff beyond this point, Warning! Continue reading →