October 3
The big news – and it’s pretty big – is:
Yours truly was named MCSD Graveyard Employee of the Month for September!
I am not making that up! The lover of 10-10’s and founder of the Foot on the Desk Percentage was named MCSD’s Graveyard Employee of the Month!
Now, that’s a pretty specific group, and if it were any narrower everyone in the department would get a prize every month, but the award is a $40 comp to the coffee shop, so everyone can blow me.
I’ve come up with a theory for working the hotel: ten percent of your guests cause 90 percent of your problems.
Since Labor Day we’ve been pretty slow in terms of the number and severity of the calls we’ve had in the hotel. There are still people coming to Monte Carlo. Occupancy is usually somewhere between 80 and 90 percent, which is relatively low, but in a 3200 room hotel you’re still talking about 2400 to 2700 rooms being occupied and you would think some of them would act up over the course of a night.
But you would be wrong. We are not getting the big parties to break up, or as many domestics and the nudity factor has, sadly, sunk like a stone. It is making for some rather leisurely nights in the hotel, even on weekends.
D-Dawg and I did respond to a four-nine-nine Sunday morning, though. We had just given X-Ray our scanners for him to take to the office and we are headed to the 12th-floor maid’s room for debriefing when Junior gets on the horn:
– Control to all Henry units…
Whenever Junior calls all Henry units and then pauses, something is going on. Maybe not The Deal, but something is happening. Most often it is a four-nine-nine.
Which is what we had here. D-Dawg and I happened to be at the second-floor E-Core, so it was a simple matter to wait and see which floor we were headed to and get on the appropriate elevator.
Jeremy, day shift Henry 1, is sent to get the med bag, X-Ray is sent to lockout an elevator and D-Dawg and I are sent to the 17th floor, where someone is having trouble breathing and Junior announces that paramedics are on the way.
We get there and a young lady is lying on the bed breathing very hard. She is able to answer my dumb questions though, and mom reports she has been vomiting most of the night, has Type I diabetes, and, is taking a couple of medications.
I have no clue what to do. Jeremy hasn’t arrived with the goddamn med bag yet and while I am a certified CPR instructor the girl is breathing and doesn’t require CPR.
So – and this where years of sports officiating came in handy – I acted like I knew what I was doing. I told D-Dawg to inform dispatch exactly what we had and to make it really appear like I knew what I was doing I told D-Dawg what to say, which was completely unnecessary because D-Dawg already knew what to say. I did all this with a calm, professional demeanor, giving an appearance of command that would’ve given Hitler a hard-on. People find this appearance of command reassuring, even when you’ve done nothing to reassure them.
I asked the girl a few questions, simple stuff like is anything else hurting, have you been ill recently, and are you taking any medication. The only thing wrong with her was she was breathing really fast. It wasn’t even shallow or labored, and there was nothing to do but stand there and be reassuring. Soon enough Jeremy (whose cute wife drives a pink Mustang) arrived, and as we were preparing to deliver oxygen the paramedics arrived. They took her vitals, asked her the same questions I did and also determined that her only problem was she was breathing too fast. The paramedics basically told her to knock it off and they ended up not transporting her.