Earning My Keep

It happened again. In fact, it's been happening so often lately that I slept through it last night. Twice.

Emergency calls had been steadily kicking my ass for much of October, and now they've crossed over into November. A majority of these calls aren't actually emergencies (or for that matter, guests of the inn). I get hookers calling looking for rooms at 2am, taxi drivers trying to find out who called a cab (hint: if it's 5am, I've been asleep all night, not working, so...no idea!), and people who are just generally clueless and need a little extra hand-holding. This type of call is generally ends pretty quickly, and I'm usually able to fall asleep again within 10 minutes or so. However, the calls of people screaming about temperature issues (annoying, but a relatively quick fix), inability to use their room phones/wireless internet (not actually an emergency), or needing an extra bed (ABSOLUTE WORST) take much longer to recover from. Usually it's a half hour or more before I can fall asleep, and when you factor in the time it takes to tend to these matters, I'm losing valuable hours of sleep per week.

I keep telling myself it's worth it to live rent free, and I know logically that it is. But when I fell asleep at 7:30pm last Friday, I realized that my body isn't aware of this arrangement. Poor thing.

Last week

Things have been crazy lately. Part of living here rent-free is being on-call, should any guest emergency arise overnight that requires innkeeper intervention. Last week, I had a streak of five or six days straight in which I received emergency calls. I normally get fewer calls than that per month! A couple of them were just people arriving late who didn't know what to do, which didn't require any action on my part, but I also had a lockout or two, plus a couple of temperature complaints (our central heating/cooling system is ridiculous). I feel like I've really earned my rent-free status. ;P

It's been quiet so far this week, and I'm hoping it stays that way. I'm exhausted!