October 30
The big news, and it’s pretty big, is that D-Dawg is expecting. After settling on Heidi as the sole object of his, uh, affections a few weeks ago, the pair got busy and voila!, Heidi is pregnant. To steal another quote – since I am incapable of original thought – this one from a Garrison Keillor novel, they got on the train and now they are in Chicago. Both appear to be pleased, and D-Dawg admits they both wanted it, in more ways than one, evidently.
Also, Twerp’s wife dropped their second kid Thursday night, another daughter.
And in other news from the MCSD family desk, 77Rick and his wife are separating. I was in the office returning the Henry 1 scanner one morning and Judy and Rick were there talking about it. It’s really none of my business, but they didn’t stop talking and it is customary to sit and chat for a while in this situation, so I got the lowdown, even finding out that 77Rick had taken the precaution of changing the locks on his house so the ex wouldn’t steal any more of the furniture. As Judy and I were leaving, she asked me my thoughts and I didn’t really have any, so I mumbled something about 77Rick changing the locks again just to piss her off more, which was a throwaway line uttered so as not to appear like a complete retard, but Judy found this uproariously funny, and, for some reason, Rick even laughed.
Here was your Henry lineup for last night:
Henry 1 – OMP
Henry 2 – moi
Henry 3 – D-Dawg
That’s it. Only three Henry units, not four, like there usually is on weekends. Twerp was penciled in at Henry 4, but he has called off the past three nights and rather than run a unit short in the casino, the Henry units take it in the shorts.
Let me tell you something, having only three Henry units on a weekend keeps you busting hump, especially if you’re Henry 2 because a lot of calls require two officers, so Henry 2 is responding not only to calls on his floors but providing backup to Henry 1 and Henry 3 as well.
And, we were pretty hopping last night. So hopping I only got one round in, which isn’t much, and you can forget about a decent Foot on the Desk percentage. And poor D-Dawg was put to work like a red-headed stepchild because I spent a good portion of the night dealing with a whining, sniveling milquetoast in 32-208.
I first had the pleasure of this man’s acquaintance at 0130. I had actually been sent to the room below his suite, 31-220 because there was water dripping out of their ceiling. Investigation by the engineering department showed that the Jacuzzi on 32-208 had overflowed, the sill had flooded and the water had made its way down to 31-220.
Exactly why the Jacuzzi had an acre-foot of water on the sill wasn’t immediately clear. We suspect that the guy and his wife had been getting busy and gotten a tad carried away, but we don’t know.
Anyway, the official engineering report said the guy in 32-208 had been ‘negligent’ and when Dion, the hotel operations manager and a good guy, called to inform him of this fact, the guy was pissed and Dion was obliged to spend a lot of time listening to him and ended up hanging up on him. We do not usually hang up on guests, but when they are swearing or yelling at us or otherwise not being reasonable, it sometimes happens.
At 0200 I am still up there, but OMP relieves me so I can go 482 and I thought the whole matter was over, as far as I was concerned.
I was wrong. At 0400 (Pacific Daylight Time, MCSD didn’t change their clocks back until 0500, so we had two 0400’s) I was sent back to 32-208. Dispatch said the guy wanted to talk about something or another. What he wanted to chat about wasn’t specified, but I got the impression he wanted to talk to me specifically.
I was right. Though others had attended to him, I had been his responding officer, a bond apparently too tight to break.
I get there and he wants to complain. He was not happy he had been found negligent and, in fact, he had conducted his own personal investigation into the matter, the results of which had found the hotel negligent because the seal around the Jacuzzi was faulty. He even invited me to see for myself, an offer I declined, truthfully telling him I had zero mechanical skills and wouldn’t really know what I was looking for. There could’ve been a gaping hole in the floor with someone standing over it with a hose and I still would have done some zero good.
After about 20 minutes of his sniveling, I got tired of spinning my wheels because there was really nothing I could do for him, so I asked him what he would like me to do for him. This is an excellent customer service technique because it puts the ball squarely in their court.
Well, he said, he would like it if I got both Dion and whatever incompetent was masquerading as an engineering supervisor up there.
I almost laughed. I am just a grunt security guard and I do not have the power to make people appear at will. I did say I would talk to Dion and let him know his concerns and even offered to call him after I did talk to Dion, an offer he accepted.
But he still wasn’t satisfied and he started sniveling again! I was determined not to stand there and listen to this because it was more or less pointless and really keeping me from racking up Foot on the Desk time, so I asked him if he would like to fill out a voluntary statement and his eyes light up and he says yes.
This brilliant idea cost me another 45 minutes! He wouldn’t stop writing! He wrote really small and took the allotted space in the front and half the unlined back side and all told I spent over an hour in the room.
D-Dawg and I were both hoping for a quiet 0600 debriefing session, but no such luck. We had five welfare checks and even a noise complaint and a guest assist.