27 June 2026

I mentioned the other day that we were expecting a VIP at work and that I didn’t think it was Owner because usually when Owner visits, we’re just told that Owner will be visiting and no one beats around the bush.

It was Owner.

Owner and Mrs. Owner didn’t boss me and M around as much as they had previously been given to do, but M chatted them up much more than I did (I did not at all, in fact) and they wanted to know if I ever really worked because they weren’t seeing me out on the floor. Meanwhile we were hopping because it was a typical busy-season day and what do you know, there’s a lot of stuff to do in the kitchen when you can’t heat up food ahead and then keep it on the warmer. Because the warmer is fucking broken and Owner refuses to fix it. M set them straight that I’m actually a hard worker, so they sat there and observed for a while and discovered that, hey, she’s right. They wound up praising me to the GM. Mild praise, but something. Meanwhile Owner told M he would never give us any sort of warmer, fixing the existing one or even getting us a smaller and cheaper one, because it “makes [us] lazy.” Basically condemning us to waste more coffee and either waste food or not have enough food when we hit a rush, and we experienced both conditions at various times.

Yesterday GM told me that her attempt to order enough food for four days was stymied by the management company, which ranks above her but below Owner, and they told her to watch more closely for waste. She has already been watching closely for waste. She asked me the first couple months I was at this job to start noting my hot-food usage, not just the eggs, and she never said stop so I’ve been doing it ever since. And we normally do really well on waste. Once in a while I miscalculate how the guests will behave and I overdo something. As I did yesterday because we had 94 rooms and usually have a rush at about 8:30 (what the fuck is it with you people and last-half-hour breakfast runs at a hotel? Stop doing that!) but this time the rush did not materialize.

But after all the supply problems we’ve had this month coupled with one of the chafing dishes giving up the ghost — and we were told that would be replaced and it’s not fucking happening — and losing the warmer and then Owner even thinking about calling us lazy, and on top of that, lately, we’ve been having these workmen coming in and bringing their fucking friends from other hotels and eating me out of house and home in less than fifteen minutes (it takes twenty minutes to air-fry sausage patties, forty for sausage crumbles or potatoes, and I only had one glass dish to microwave things in that I would have had to wash and sanitize in order to change foods), AND I keep remembering things I need to work on in my personal life but every day I get off work I’m fucking exhausted and half the time I fall asleep… Oh yeah, that’s the other thing. If I am working by myself, I’m there longer because silly me, I want the place to actually be clean and ready for the next day and now, I’m bad for “taking overtime.” I never hit forty hours in a week, much less more than. What the fuck is this “overtime”? I looked on my pay stub. It’s there too. Somebody clearly does not understand U.S. labor law. And Owner wants us to address the people-from-other-hotels problem by instituting a coupon system wherein one of us stands out in the dining room where we can see people coming in and asks arriving guests to present their coupons NOBODY HAS TIME FOR THAT BULLSHIT. I had hoped GM had convinced him to back down on that one. GM did not convince him.

Plus we can’t seem to get a decent third employee for the breakfast area. We have been through two duds now and the new guy doesn’t sound real promising either. He might be okay. He might be a fucking nightmare. I have too much to worry about already without also babysitting an old guy who’s opinionated about us microwaving scrambled eggs in plastic bags even though we literally have no other option except liquid eggs, and he won’t like those either. No. The guests complaining that there iSn’T eNoUgH VaRiEtY or that they didn’t get hot food even though they refused to stand in line were bad enough.

And THEN… that’s right. I’m not done… and THEN, over the time I have had this job, I have had to deal with people in my off-work life not understanding the basic fucking concept of Dana Needs At Least Six Hours’ Sleep Because Dana Drives To And From Work And Would Like To Not Die. It’s coming back from a trip at 10pm or 2am, both really bad times because I have to be in bed between 7pm and 8pm ideally as I was getting up at 3:30am, or it’s making noise past 9pm and/or getting the dogs riled up some way, or it’s throwing trash in the back of the pickup without warning me and I have to drive it to work with it like that, or it’s having visitors parking in the driveway but not warning them to give me space to get out, or it’s having visitors blocking the fucking gate when I get back from work and I have to text someone to get in, which L is seldom what you’d call timely on replying to texts because she is disinterested in her phone on principle, even when it’s making text-alert noises at her. None of this happens every single day, but it shouldn’t be happening at all. I am accustomed to people who actually pay attention to logistical details. I have never been able to get used to the sorts of people who think, Oh, this is clearly someone else’s problem because I am Important and have too many other things to do. There is no such thing as being too important to deal with basic shit. There just isn’t.

Basically, GM’s been lovely and M’s been amazing but my actual employer would replace me with a fucking robot if he could, and it would be a lot easier to deal with my housemate if I didn’t have to also fret about getting enough sleep or being able to get to work or being able to get back onto the property after work so I could, y’know, actually decompress and get out of the monkey suit and such. I’m tired of feeling constantly under siege. And I NEED MORE SLEEP.

Plus I have eight thousand dollars in savings right now. With more coming in the not-so-distant future when I get paperwork sorted out. (I am waiting on certified mail for that right now.) And I have long been used to living on next to nothing.

So I bet you can’t guess what I did.

I am the world’s biggest asshole for not giving prior notice. I did give notice, it’s just real-time notice because it’s happening now. Or actually, it happened last night. I knew that if I told GM last night instead of just not showing up today, she’d have time to sort things. I also knew she’d be subbing night auditor, which ideally positions her TO sort things. If I was gonna throw a tantrum, now was the time. And it wasn’t really a tantrum. I just laid out what has been going on with me — this job doesn’t even have compassionate leave, for fuck’s sake, and I’ve been running on emotional fumes all fucking month — and that I wouldn’t be back.

Typically, when L has housemates, they often use the time to develop skills or write a book or work on some aspect of their lives that they couldn’t work on as well if they were working forty hours a week and paying rent. I haven’t been able to take advantage of that because Poor and Desperate. I am not out of the woods yet, either, but I’m a lot better positioned than I was nearly a year ago. I have three fucking courses I’d like to work on, one of which should help me get an actually important job where I won’t be treated like a necessary-evil pain in the ass (I don’t need a tickertape parade but fuck, don’t hire people you don’t actually want around) and that will actually provide me things like compassionate leave and HEALTHCARE COVERAGE. Because I was also making too much to keep Medicaid (they call it MediCAL here in CA) but not making enough to afford ACA coverage if I wasn’t going to be subsidized. I’ve been white-knuckling it all year. Enough. Let me get some fucking breathing room and sort myself out.

I didn’t need the enhanced access to crap food, either. I haven’t weighed myself in over a month because I’m actually afraid to see the number. I can just tell by how my clothes fit. That needs to get turned around in a hurry. I’m sure my blood sugar has been atrocious too.

So. I can’t promise I will update things here more often, but the point is that at least now I’m not going to be torn between writing here and taking a fucking nap. And the nap usually wins. And it’s not even a good nap because I keep waking up afraid that I’ve left it too late and haven’t swept the house yet for the day. I wasn’t even getting days off on my days off — I always had to do something for some other person, with my job or my housing depending directly on the outcome, each and every fucking day. I will know I have “made it” when I have entire days that are all my own. I’ll keep you posted on how it goes.