Humans...are a Parasite

Just a quick update to tell you my schedule and why I'm excited for it to be the weekend.

Tonight will be my eighth night shift in a row! Luckily it won't be ghost-town around the motel. I'll have a new employee to train -a nice woman who has handy skills as an accountant, since she worked at H & R Block. She just moved from Toronto. Last night I practiced doing "mock walks" with her and having her show me the guest rooms. I would pretend to be the cheap customer, the rich customer, the annoying customer So what's the rate? What's the rate? and the needy customer Can I get some more towels a bottle of water and do you have any extra condomns? -a customer for every season, then make her suit my needs for room type and location. When we were standing outside, we noticed little things moving in the garbage can. They were sick. They were probably feeding off someone's pizza or something and it reminded me of Agent Smith in The Matrix, where he says "humans are a parasite..." in the slow, drawly/creepy voice of his. Maybe it's true. We're all feeding and festering off information, uploading our viruses to the internet.

Agent Smith knows.

Later I showed her the computer operations, electronic logbook, general housekeeping stuff and the Night Audit. The Night Audit can be confusing because it's all these reports that print out of the POS terminal and the computer. You have to give the computer instructions but they are tough to remember. Therefore, we have a list of answers to give it, which is just basically a sheet that says: "type 'yes' then press then press then enter code '098'" etc. It gets tricky because you want to make sure to do it all in order, paper-juggling, stapling the right reports to the right print-outs and marking them accordingly. Before she left she said "I didn't understand anything we did in the last hour but the rest was ok" which is encouraging. When I started working there, I didn't understand anything!!

It was good training for me to train. Tonight will be even more intense as I let her take the reins and take check-ins and reservations herself. The best way to learn, she said, is to let her "fumble her way through it" and I agree.

When she left, I had to rush to get everything else that I usually do when I'm not training someone else done.
From 5AM to 8AM I:

• Wrote everything in the cash report into the computer or "electronic log book"
• Made coffee and set up breakfast
• Gave people wake-up calls
• Looked at my notes and realized I had forgotten to wake up my boss at 3am (he wakes up at that time to go to the mosque)
• Watered the plants
• I thought there was a maggot infestation but realized that there were some kinds of worm crawling all over the stairs to the front door. We're these the "little things moving in the garbage can" a few hours before? They had multiplied by the thousand!
• I spent about half an hour trying to erradicate these little beasts by spraying them with a hose. However, every time I got rid of one, more would come. They were in front of me, behind me, climbing up the walls!! They made me cringe because they looked like maggots. I didn't want to step on them or get them on me. I had no idea where they were coming from!! Guests were starting to come in for breakfast and to check out. I would smile and say "Good morning" as if it were normal to be watering the pavement and spraying the glass doors. Speaking of maggots and checking out, check out how maggots can be used to treat wounds, not that I wouldn't rather die of axe wounds than have these things crawl all over me.
• Spent a good while getting yelled at for there being a credit card imprint missing on one of the folios then from someone who wanted to cancel their reservation but wouldn't listen to me when I told him we couldn't cancel reservations that HE BOOKED ONLINE. I gave him the number to call but he must have been an untechnological type because he kept saying "well, it says your hotel name on the site". Yes, but YOU BOOKED IT ONLINE. YOU DIDN'T BOOK IT THROUGH US. THEREFORE WE CAN'T CANCEL YOUR RESERVATION. TRAVELOCITY CAN!! Sometimes I wish people learned how to use the Internet. I had already checked someone in who, on account of booking their own reservation online for the wrong day, got angry at me because they had no reservation booked for the day they arrived. People.

My boss who I had called late for a wake-up call, who ended up already being awake came in to pester me about things being out of order. With a million and one things to do, he still expects things to be in tip-top shape. So he would go through every little detail: Make sure you keep the window open. Turn off the air conditioner to save energy. Make sure the sign for milk is up. Make sure you count all the folios. Keep the paper in the printer full. I have to be his maid, his accountant and his alarm clock. He's like a vampire sometimes. I think perhaps he has some kind of parasite living in him which feeds off of sleep and as a result, he is always awake and irritable. As a result of that, he's always willing to come in at any point and feed off of my energy. If I call any potential problems or misbalances to his attention he demands "WHY?!" then when I try to fix mistakes on my own but he finds out later he will say "you should have told me IMMEDIATELY!!" You can't win either way. During these pleasant discourses, all I can do is say "Yes. Yes, I did that. No, no one told me to do that. No, I didn't make that reservation. Yes, I checked under the bed. No, he's already checked out" and so forth.

So this will be the end of my elogated night shift stint. It is time to escape this virtual world and get out of "the matrix". I'll go to a "Jack and Jill" which some of you big city types may not have heard of. (It's like a fundraiser for a wedding. AKA "stag and stagette"). We're all getting together to party and camp. I've got a brand new tent! I'm going up with my friend who will be deejaying so it should be a nice little vacation from parasites, both the worms and the humans.

Have a good weekend!

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UPDATE: The worms, maggots, or WHATEVER they were are gone. (Thank heavens!) Was I hallucinating? No, the owner saw them too...at least I think that was the owner. Strangely, tonight they have all disappeared. In their place are several other insects, including a beetle that is peculiarly camouflaged to the exact shade of paint decorating our doorway, a desert sandy yellow. I pointed it out to a Zoologist and now he won't leave. Come to think of it, I remember seeing a sparrow make the discovery and snack away at the worms, eating its fill. More sparrows caught on to the treat that the first was getting and joined in, until there were five or so. Could they have possibly eaten them all? There must have been a lot of them. Otherwise, I would expect to see dead bloated sparrow carcasses lying around. The incident was reminiscent of scenes from Stephen King's The Dark Half. The sparrows are messengers from the netherworld, ushering the worms off to another realm. Ah! The circle of life! Interestingly, The Dark Half is also a story about a kind of parasite that lives in the brain of a boy. They find out that his tumour is actually his less developed half, or twin brother, fully equipped with hair and teeth of its own! I remember seeing this film when I was about eight and it has changed me permanently. The plot is very implausible, however, it is true that they have found tumours in people with cells that are differentiated to the point of forming teeth or hair or even extra organs!

Do you have a darker half?

Read another review of The Dark Half here.

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