An Education on Hotel Security

This past weekend, J and I made a trip up to Cleveland with D.  He was going up to work with a woman’s chorus at their regional competition and they had a late night rehearsal on Friday and an early morning rehearsal on Saturday.  We didn’t arrive until around 9:00 Friday night and went to the room to drop our stuff.  As is custom, Jamison asked to stay in the room and watch TV.  We do our fare share of travelling, and he is very used to this drill.  It was late enough that we knew he’d fall asleep pretty quickly anyway, so we left him there and headed to rehearsal.

We got back to the room around 11:30 that night.  We were both very tired and I was actually have some pretty decent pain, so I was excited about getting into the bed and resting.  We put the key in the slot and got a nice and festive red and green blinking light. WTF.  Stupid hotel keys.  They are so fragile and able to be jacked up way too easily.  Or so we thought.

We banged on the door and yelled a bit to have J come and let us in.  The kid was dead to the world.  He sleeps like, I hate to say “like a rock” because it is so overused, but he does.  He was out and there was no waking him up.  On to plan B.  The room was not in our name, but in the name of a chorus member, so we had to track her down and she went down to the front desk to get a new key.  She returned with the key and the name of a guy to call if it didn’t work.  It didn’t work so we called the guy.  He came up and tried the key and then left to check and see what this particular sequence of blinking and colors meant.
It meant that the dead bolt was locked.  Fan-fucking-tastic.

Now, anyone who has stayed in a hotel in the last 10 years know that the locks are all electronic now.  So being fairly techie people, D and I figure that they can just pop it somehow, right?  Well I guess not.  Mr. Maintenance man did the same thing we did.  He banged on the door.  He shook the door.  He made 15 kinds of noise and nothing.  This kid was not waking up.  He went away, I’m not sure where, and came back and did some more banging and such.  Then he went away again.  At this point I’m a little frustrated.  It had been a good 45 minutes or more and we were still standing in the hallway.  This is a public facility, there HAS to be a way to get into these rooms under these conditions.  Well, Mr.Maintenance returns with Mr. Night Manger.  Then Mr. Maintenance and Mr. Night Manger get into a fight about the best way to get into the room and is this the right code and do these flashing lights really mean this, blah, blah argue-cakes.  Whatever.  Just get me in my damn room already.

Mr. Night Manager apologizes and then they both go away.  I lie on the floor and begin yelling through the crack at the bottom of the door.  “Jamison.  Wake up and let us in please”  Etc, etc.

Mr. Night Manager returns.  We are going on an hour and a half at a minimum at this point.  I’m ready to go sleep in another room and just come back in the morning when he will be awake and hungry and will need to let me in so I can get him food.  But they are here for a last stand to get us in the room.  We tell Mr. Night Manager that the big silver box on the door where the lock is has an input jack of some sort on the bottom.  This would indicate that there is some sort of something that can be plugged into it.  Does this magic contraption exist and if so can we use it?  Mr. Night Managerexplains that yes, there is a magic machine that will trip the deadbolt, but Company Policy dictates that only ONE STAFF MEMBER have access and knowledge on how to use this machine.  And of course this ONE STAFF MEMBER is not present at 12:30 am on Friday/Saturday.  Mr. Night Manger does not do a good job of covering his contempt for this Company Policy and indicates that this isprecisely the reason more people need to know about this machine.  I tend to agree.  I mean, I’m all for security and such, but I think that the ONE STAFF MEMBER policy should be amended to read ONE STAFF MEMBER ON DUTY AT ANY GIVEN TIME.  Had that been the case, I’d have been asleep myself by now.

About this time, Mr. Maintenance Man re-appears with the sinister sounding Door Spreader.  And that is exactly what it does.  It is a hydraulic jack hooked up to a long metal pole that extends and spreads the door jamb apart so they can jimmy or force the door open.  They are going to break the door so we can get in.  Awesome.  All of this for little old me?

He puts the spreader in the jamb and starts a pumping the jack.  You can hear the wood and inner door jamb parts cracking and creaking.  D clarifies quickly that no one is going to be charged for this right? And no, we won’t.  Mr. Night Manager plans to include the fact that had there been ONE STAFF MEMBER ON DUTY with access to the magic machine, we wouldn’t have had to break the lovely hotel room door now would we.  It will all be in his report.

The door is spread a bit and we can now see that the deadbolt is indeed locked, as well as that little metal door thingy at the top that you can use for extra security.  Apparently J was expecting an invasion.  He fiddles with the two locks for about a minute and no luck on getting them popped.  So he resorts to the final tool in his arsenal.  He kicks the door open.  Yes.  Kicks.  Like Bruce Lee or Chuck Norris.  Kicks that sucker right open.  It strips all the screws on the latch of the little metal door thingy, but whatever, we are in our room.  And there is J.  Sleeping like a dead person on the bed.  He. Never. Woke. Up.

We test the door to find that it still works and locks perfectly fine, so we don’t have to move to a different room.  We thank Mr.Maintenance Man and Mr. Night Manager and close the door.  Then as soon as they were gone we took pictures.

Here is the “damage” to the door frame.  Not much really, a little dent. Probably won’t need to be fixed at all.

Here is the cause of all this trouble.  Sleeping soundly on the bed.

I undressed him and put him in the bed and he didn’t wake up until about 7:00 the next morning.  And now I know a lot more about hotel room doors than I ever really wanted to.