February 23
Here was your Henry lineup for last night:
Henry 1 – moi
Henry 2 – Lee
Henry 3 – X-Ray
Lee’s pretty funny. We had wrapped up a couple of welfare checks right before I was about to head home and we’re walking down the 200 wing of some floor.
“Whew, those were good,” Lee said, as if we had just wrapped up something difficult. “Great welfare checks.”
“They were, weren’t they?” I ask significantly, turning my head towards him for emphasis.
“Good times, partner.”
Then we get completely carried away and start high-fiving each other and Lee starts humming the intro to Eye of the Tiger.
Also last night I spent a not-insignificant amount of time in a room whose safe refused to open. Engineering was there to open it, which requires a security presence not because Monte Carlo engineers are thieves but in case any contraband happens to be found in the safe.
Unfortunately, Justin and Isaac couldn’t open the safe and decided to call in a locksmith from day shift, ignoring my suggestion we call in Lance Burton, Master Magician because he’s always opening safes that supposedly can’t be opened. Once he got there, it took him about three seconds to open it. He removed a plate from the front, inserted a key into the keyhole, turned it a few times and voila, the safe was opened.
February 24
Here was your Henry lineup for last night:
Henry 1 – moi
Henry 2 – Lee
Henry 3 – X-Ray
The big call last night was so top secret that JK, Boy Dispatcher couldn’t even tell me about it over the regular security channel. I was sitting in a storeroom in what would normally be room 29-336 with my feet up when John gets on the horn.
– Control, Henry 1.
– Henry 1, 10-8, sir.
– Gimme a 21 (phone call), code four.
There’s a phone in the storeroom, but the mouthpiece isn’t working, so I go to the security channel 2.
– Henry 1, on 2.
– Yeah, go to 18-105. The lady there who cut herself. She needs band aids and wants a report done.
– You’ve got to be kidding me.
– Junior: Get out of doing the report! Do whatever you have to do!
– Yeah, kiss it and make it better, or something.
– Yeah, bend over if you have to.
– OK, I get the idea. I don’t want a report any more than you do. I’m not putting out, though.
So I get there and there are two ladies in the room, evidently mother and daughter because the young one called the other one mom, but if so they were the most incongruous mother/daughter pair in history. Mom looked and talked like Estelle Getty and could give me a refresher in swearing. The daughter was the size of Rosanne and had a deep Southern accent.
Mom, had, indeed, cut herself. I applied a bandage and they’re chatty folk so I get the story about how Katrina displaced them from their home in Biloxi and, like the few other Katrina refugees I’ve met, they’ve taken the destruction of their homes with rather good humor. Mom had also won $1500 earlier and was slightly annoyed she couldn’t find a cup of to-go coffee. She let it be known she could really go for a strong goddamn cup of joe before beddy-bye.
The easiest solution to the problem, since she really didn’t want to pay for room service to deliver a pot of coffee, was for me to go to the EDR and get her a cup. So I make the offer and she accepts, specifying three creamers and three sugars and the whole deal took a half-hour instead of ten minutes but there was no report and I had to be somewhere during that time anyway.
Since 77Dwayne doesn’t seem to care what we do in the hotel I have taken to turning in very leisurely nights. I used to get two and a half rounds in on a normal night, which resulted in satisfactory Foot on the Desk percentages. And I thought I was stealing money then.
Now, I am lucky to get two rounds in and for my efforts I was named Employee of the Month. Go figure.
X-Ray and Lee have also noticed 77Dwayne’s indifference and they are turning in more leisurely tours, as well.
Here’s an example: last night the three of us responded to a potential domestic dispute on 30. It turned out to be nothing, just some drunk guys arguing and after the call we retired to the 30th-floor maids room, which has a desk and enough chairs to accommodate three tired Henry units. We spent a half-hour there. In fact, X-Ray took his 10-10 there and the only reason we broke it up was that Lee wanted to take his 10-10 in the EDR.
Response time to calls is still very good, though. That’s why we’re there, dammit, to respond to calls, and we’re still on the move even before dispatch tells us where to go. We can only let supervisorial indifference affect us so much.
A new guy started this week, a young Hispanic kid named George, whom Bi-Bob – his training officer – has already nicknamed Gorgeous George. I told Rich he could dust off the ‘don’t tell him about the lap dances till day three’ line, but Rich said he’ll probably save it till later in the training cycle.
Here is your Henry lineup for tonight:
Henry 1 – OMP
Henry 2 – moi
Henry 3 – X-Ray