Fun times and Hotel Hijinks with Djinn:
So I've been working at the Embassy Suites for a few months now and for the most part, it's pretty fun. I like working with people and the job isn't too high-stress except during holiday weekends.
But this week has been different, and it had very little to do with Mother's Day.
I began training recently to perform the Night Audit shift. It's basically 8 hours during the middle of the night where all I do is some paperwork, occasionally give directions to a drunk guest, and play handheld video games or read books. Best of all, I can sit down the whole time and there's no managers around (not that they care if we spent the whole time on youtube so long as the paperwork gets done).
It's great, but it messes with your sleep schedule, and management hasn't been particularly quick to pick up on the fact that most human beings can't go to sleep at 7 AM and then be alert and ready to deal with 200 hotel guests at 11 AM. So I've been a little grouchy lately. It's not entirely management's fault, I know my boss is trying, but there's been some complications this particular week. Mainly that we suddenly got understaffed more quickly than anticipated.
You see, I was training for Night Audit because one of our two current Night Auditors is leaving. Additionally, his fiancee is one of our main day shift Front Desk people and they are both moving away soon. Okay, so the hotel was preparing for that. However, this week also saw another Front Desker hospitalized with a burst cyst in his -mouth-, and another Front Desker (my usual evening shift co-worker buddy) was just informed his mother had finally passed away from cancer. Less than a week before Mother's Day. Yeah.
So I volunteered to cover his usual shifts in addition to mine AND had to start Night Audit training all in the same week as we dropped down to half of our usual staff numbers. I'm a bit drained since I'm -still- working 2 other jobs AND working out 5 days a week.
And then yesterday I finally broke. Not so much from the work. The job is easy and I'm good at it. No, I broke because it was Colin's last week at the Hotel and I was stuck working with him for the evening shift. Colin is the Night Auditor who is leaving. Colin is a huge JRPG fan, a comic book geek, pretty clever guy. He's also a raging racist asshole and I now entirely understand why he was put on duty at Night Audit shift where he'd do the least amount of damage talking to -people-.
The previous few times I'd gotten to work with Colin, conversation was decently fun, we had a lot of interests in common and he's got a forceful, funny personality. He also is one of those people with no boundaries or filters. He's a bit abrasive, but whatever, most geeks worth talking to are abrasive.
Yesterday, he went on a short tirade about black people and it bothered me.
He'd made comments like this before, but I just assumed he was exaggerating for humor purposes. This time, there wasn't really any qualifications to his statements. He wasn't saying "Oh, those black people that just checked in were stupid/unintelligent/cheap/ugly/dishonest/poor/assholes/whatever.", he was making broad generalizations about the entire race. And yeah, he was trying to be funny, but there wasn't any joke being made. The humorous part to him was that they were black, and oh aren't black people terrible.
Maybe I was tired and I read too much into what he was trying to say? So I countered with, "Well yeah, those particular people were assholes, but it's not because they were black."
And then he launched into a tirade about how he used to be in the military and has lived in like 4 different states and he's never met a black person worthwhile and I lost it. He pushed me onto a soap box and I called him out for being a close-minded racist and an abrasive asshole in general for about an hour. And then had to work with him for the next 4 hours.
It was unpleasant and I was too tired to deal with him.
Now I have to go into work with him again today and it's his last day.
I have no idea how I'm going to get through this without going off on him or quitting mid-shift. And I'm still fucking tired from my stupid work schedule.
