30 June 2026

The chronic-condition kids on social media often talk about neurological regulation and dysregulation and all the ways that life can make us dysregulated, which in turn affects “neurodiverse” people more severely and blah, blah, blah. I don’t know how much of it is valid and how much of it is just random people malingering, but it isn’t all random people malingering, because I know what they’re talking about. For instance, the more stressed out I am, the dumber I get and the more mistakes I make, and the longer I have to shut myself up in the bedroom when it’s all over and eat horrible snack foods and doomscroll social media and play phone games. Not necessarily those specific things — at other times in my life it’s been other behaviors, like drawing or doing crafts — but always something for coping. So I get it, even if the concept is possibly currently being abused hither and yon.

Accordingly, after I complained that part of what made my job so stressful is people here at the house not getting the fuck out of my way and letting me do what I need to do — acting, in fact, as if I’m not even here or as if I have no needs or logistical requirements at all — the universe validated me because, the morning after I quit, this black car I had never seen before was parked in the turnaround spot for the driveway, so close to the driveway that it would have been a backwards drive down the driveway again just to get out the gate. And there is one more place I can turn the vehicle around before going through the gate, but from the house I cannot see whether anyone is parked there. They probably hadn’t been, but I couldn’t know that. So it felt a bit dodging a bullet.

It seems like such a stupid, minor thing, but that’s a long driveway and there are gates at the entrance and I can either open both up, which one of them is not seated securely on its end of the fence, or I can open one up and pray that I don’t hit the post or the other half of the gate going through. And normally I don’t hit anything, but I also have never driven backwards through that fucking gate. Much less at four-thirty in the morning on inadequate sleep. Wouldn’t have enjoyed it.

A lot of what bugged me about the job was like that. I went over highlights last time I posted about this. Those were the major themes, but there were piles and piles of minor things behind the scenes that never seemed to resolve, even though some of them could have been stopped and I had made significant efforts to resolve them.

For instance.

We were supposed to use a special app to communicate with one another, but no one ever gave me a login for it, and when I first installed it on my phone, it crashed every time I tried to use it. Fortunately this never became an issue, but it could have done. Nevertheless, the result was I was out of the loop for a lot of things going on. I doubt anyone wondered why they never heard from me, but I’m glad nothing important came up where I would have been required to be present and listening.

I was never clear whether I was supposed to get a food-handling certificate. I had one co-worker (in the breakfast area) say that I would have to get one, and another one (a night auditor) saying that he’d be happy to cross-train into breakfast because he already had one. GM herself never raised the issue. I have decent home training on how to keep things clean, so I just followed whatever infographic posters happened to be around and did the best I could otherwise. The place WAS a lot cleaner while I was there, and specifically when I was working, so I guess that was all right. But GM should have followed up with me about that. I get that she was busy, but come on. I was there for most of a year!

(It’s a valid question, because California has two different minimum wages: one for fast food places and one for everyone else, and everyone else earns about four bucks less an hour. If we’re serving warm-up premade food, does that not count? Does it depend on business category designation instead — does being a hotel rule out being labeled as any sort of food service, much less fast food? I’ll never know, because I don’t care enough to pursue it. But if someone out there is looking to reform California labor laws — again — here you go: a possible windmill for you to tilt at. You’re welcome.)

When I started working there, our water dispenser leaked so badly that it needed to be emptied at closing so we wouldn’t come in to a fucking river on the floor. Most of the time we managed it. I could almost always count on it not having been managed when I came in to open on Thursdays after two days off. It was one of the things that absolutely enraged me about Thursdays. Matters finally came to a head and GM ordered a new water dispenser, and at first it was fine, but then I noticed the lid was warping. It’s bamboo with a plastic component and a gasket. The way it was being stored in between shifts meant that the accumulated water stayed in it and warped the bamboo, pulling the entire lid shape out of true along with it. I figured out what was happening because I noticed it would dribble a lot when I picked it up in the mornings, and I advised my coworkers not to lay it flat when they were closing, so as to let it drain and dry properly. By the time I quit, they were still not doing this and I kept having to go behind them and stand the lid up on one end. They’re going to ruin that dispenser now because I’m not keeping up with it. GM does not have endless money to keep buying new dispensers.

(If you work in procurement for some food-service outfit, don’t fucking order bamboo anything. Please. 99 percent of your employees will not know how to treat it.)

When I started there, we had two coffee carafes with black tops for regular coffee and one with an orange top for decaf. We used them to keep the dispensers on the breakfast bar refilled. Somehow or another we managed to break both black-tops in the time I was there. I think also an orange-top, and so I bought a replacement carafe at Walmart and got reimbursed for it because GM knew full well we were short on carafes, and then Other Coworker found a box with two more orange-tops in it. One of those got broken too. So by the time First Replacement Coworker (the young guy) started there, we had one orange-top and then the Walmart carafe. He broke the Walmart carafe. GM still hadn’t ordered new carafes by the time I left, or else they were ordered but hadn’t come in. Our other option was letting the dispensers get all the way empty and then taking them off the floor to refill. That is a pain in the ass and is guaranteed to generate guest complaints. But it may be what they wind up stuck with. In busy season.

I would come in on Thursdays to filthy chafing dishes, really obvious smudges on the wall mirror above the chafing dishes, handprints on the on/off levers for the toaster, and random prints and smudges and splatters everywhere else. I started going behind whoever my helper was at closing and wiping things down again. I got as far as M noticing what I was doing with the chafing dishes and wiping them herself by the time I quit, and even then she didn’t do it every day. I know those things get printy and dirty in three hours with so many people feeding themselves in that room, but that doesn’t mean the first guest to arrive needs to see a dirty place.

The detergent supplied to us to wash the various and sundry didn’t do fucking squat to get grease off the air-fryer pans or the chafing pan inserts. I had to buy store-brand Dawn from Walmart to supplement the wash water. Even with that I still also had to supply steel wool because it cut the washing time significantly. And I still had to contend with greasy plastic (say, for instance, the large bucket we used to mix the waffle batter) and with metal pans that still had food stuck to them in the mornings when I opened. One of the reasons I didn’t totally hate working alone even on a busy day was that I unequivocally would be the one washing everything. That was the only time I knew I wouldn’t be grossed out when I opened the next morning. I was the main one using the Dawn, you see.

Every little thing we didn’t do at closing, which was a minimum of two allotted hours after 9pm, was one more thing someone had to do at opening, which was always limited to an hour. I could never seem to get it through anyone’s thick skull, no matter how nice they were or how much they hyped me up to Owner, that we all needed to properly clean and stock at closing. I tried leading by example, which once in a while sort of helped, but it never fully stuck and in the mood I was in with the month I was having, this past month, I was going to start snarking soon. No good.

I also could not get it through anyone’s thick skull that this is busy season and the guests WILL go through an entire box of scrambled-egg packets in the three hours we were open (there are twelve to a box, which is typical consumption for a 105-room day) and an entire box of potato packets (there are six to a box, ditto) AND that Friday food deliveries were supposed to cover four fucking days because the next delivery day was Tuesday, so please fucking order me enough to fucking cover that time. I had a couple coping mechanisms if the eggs were scant, but one of those coping mechanisms was liquid eggs, and GM always seemed to get the nasty-smelling ones from Safeway that make it look like your scrambled eggs are turning green. (If you are going to use liquid eggs in a hotel breakfast bar, get Egg Beaters. Worst case, get Walmart. Safeway’s Lucerne brand SUCKS for this particular product, and especially the “egg white” liquid eggs. Oh and also, it’s all egg whites. The yellow stuff is just food coloring.) But it wasn’t all GM’s fault that we were even in that situation. Middle management would tell her she was doing a good job staying under food budget and labor budget, then refuse to let her order enough food to cover the weekend, even though she always ordered under budget. It was positively psychotic. Owner being a fucking Scrooge did not help matters.

We were always the redheaded stepchildren of the hotel, and it showed in how we were supplied. Chief complaint: the trash bags. You would think the GM would order the exact same trash bags for the entire hotel. You would be dead wrong. Housekeeping would get these nice strong trash bags that would survive a nuclear Armageddon. Breakfast would get these bullshit trash bags that would break in a moderate breeze. Guess who most often wound up with trash that leaked liquid all over the place. Not housekeeping. They don’t get the fucktards who think full cups of coffee magically dry up when you throw them in the trash. So I used to steal (not really… it’s all the same hotel) a roll of housekeeping’s trash bags now and again, when I was in the laundry room to pick up cleaning rags anyway, because I didn’t want to have to deal with leaky trash bags dripping coffee across the serving floor every fucking time I had to change out the trash cans. We had a similar problem with gloves. Housekeeping got all the gloves they wanted, assuming proper supplier availability. We had to go begging. They were using gloves to keep yuck off their hands. We were using gloves for food-handling. And I needed larges because my fingers get swollen or for whatever bullshit reason — I don’t have large hands, but mediums tend to tear when I put them on. M had the same problem. We never got large gloves through the normal supply channels. We had smalls and mediums that no one fucking used. Even GM’s adding of the gloves as a category to the inventory sheet didn’t help the situation at all. She just overlooked that line item. So it was steal a box of larges from the laundry room when we saw they were pretty well-supplied. GM had actually fussed at us about both the trash bags and the gloves because it messed up housekeeping’s inventory numbers. We had explained both problems to her. Nothing changed.

This breakfast room was unusually large because instead of being tucked into a corner by the front desk, it took up the entire former lounge area of what used to be the hotel’s restaurant but is now defunct. So we’re talking about half the second floor of that building. Biggest breakfast room I’ve ever seen. Using the lounge was good thinking, in terms of having space to sit and enjoy breakfast and the view. No debate there. In fact, when I first heard they were going to be rehabbing the restaurant building and turning the former lounge into guest rooms, I got mad. But as time wore on, I realized it was a good call because two of us — on a good day, otherwise just one — managing a floor area the size of half a small restaurant was fucking bullshit. The other reason it was bullshit was that we were using a kitchen area that was not designed for what we had to do. And you noticed it in the little things. For instance, we had the clean serving utensils in a metal pail in a place where food got dropped on them and wet hands dripped on them. I was the tallest person on breakfast staff and couldn’t justify moving the pail somewhere that the other two could barely reach them. We already had that problem with the milk pitchers — keeping those on top of the fridge didn’t really work, but there was nowhere else to put them. The time I needed to rearrange the entire fucking kitchen wasn’t really available, and even if I had, nobody would have kept to it. The general attitude about keeping things running smoothly was “I’m just trying to do my job and go home,” as if keeping things clean and organized wasn’t really Doing The Job. Meanwhile we were burning ourselves on the fucking air fryers because they were kept above eye level and getting things into and out of them was awkward. Well, you saw how that worked out for me two posts ago.

I knew that with us moving downstairs, they were going to be actually designing a breakfast area for us, and I dreaded it because they never listened to us any other time and I had no reason to believe they would allow us any input into the space we were going to be given to work in. So while I looked forward to not having to run around as much, I dreaded every single other thing about the prospect.

Including the rumors that we were going to be laid off when they started in on the construction work. I don’t know if that was true and I never got around to asking, but GM already didn’t communicate with me timely (more on that in a minute), so for all I knew that was exactly what was in the cards for us and she was just going to spring it on us last minute. It would have been temporary and then we’d have been called back to work, I guess, but it would have been nice to have some warning.

And speaking of communication. I had a lot to get used to when I started this job because I hadn’t worked as part of a team for a long time. So at first I would flake on telling her what was going on if it was something she needed to know. So I got fussed at for that. So I started texting her for any random little thing that I thought she might need to know. Then I heard secondhand that she had a problem with that too. We ironed it out eventually and she’d even praise me for being on top of things, but there were a lot of growing pains on the way there. I’m not that fond of arbitrary people. Especially if their being arbitrary means trouble for me. I liked her in spite of that, but provisionally, because I realize I don’t actually know her as a person and I sometimes got the vibe that she was putting on some kind of corporate positive-reinforcement act that she learned in a leadership seminar somewhere. You probably know what I’m talking about. Like that.

And all of this, plus more I’m not getting into because I know I’m beating a dead horse, happened against a backdrop of far too many entitled people going in and out of that breakfast room and expecting something like Denny’s while not having any fucking idea what was going on behind the scenes. By the time I left I was getting really crabby about them. I used to roll my eyes when I’d hear boomers or people slightly older than me (not the same people) complaining about a lack of basic civility in society. I don’t anymore. They were right. The problem is that a lot of the people doing the complaining are also a very large part of the problem, and what they mean is nobody is being civil with them. It doesn’t occur to them that they should be civil to everyone else too. I think part of the problem is the fucked-up way we look at jobs versus social status. But I’ve dragged on too long in this specific post as it is. All I know is I had completely the wrong attitude for working with the public and it wasn’t going to make an already fucked-up situation any better for anyone trapped in it. I wasn’t trapped anymore. So I removed myself rather than prolong the agony.

The point is that this sort of work is never going to be humane or sustainable (I don’t mean in an ecological sense) while it’s planned out and carried out the way it is. People want all the luxuries but they don’t want to pay for them. Then they wonder why their “luxuries” are shit quality. I will never get through their thick skulls about this any more than I could get through anyone’s thick skulls about the trash bags. My name is not Sisyphus and I am getting the fuck off this hill.