No Newspaper For You!

One of my nightly duties is to deliver the USAToday to all of the rooms that have been rented in the hotel. Each paper is put into a black burlap bag decorated with "SH" in white scripted letters, and hung on the door handle of each room.

Normally, the bags are the biggest problem I have each morning. As the maids clean the rooms, they are supposed to gather the bags and send them downstairs to the housekeeping department in the basement, where they will be gathered in bulk and taken to the bellcloset on the 1st floor. Since they do not have the code for the door lock, either security or one of the bellmen will let them in, where they can put the bags on the large roll-around spindle, thus making it easy for me to gather as many as I need to make my deliveries the next morning. This rarely happens.

Instead, I find them piled on the floor, on the shelves, on the spare bellstand--and that's if they make it to the bellcloset at all. Otherwise, they'll be in the basement piled on the laundry box in housekeeping, or on any other flat surface that's handy, or hanging from various protrusions of the housekeeping carts and machinery that happen to be around. Last week, I found 11 of them in the trash.

If they never made it to the basement, they're frequently in one pile or another on the service elevator landing of each of the guest floors, or hanging on some door handle. If I have time, I'll ask security to loan me the passkey so that I can raid the (23) maids closets,where I will find them still hanging on the maids carts, or just tossed in with the towels and linens.

Guests contribute to the problem, too. Stayover guests leave the Do Not Disturb signs on their doors, so the maids don't clean their rooms, and therefore do not have an opportunity to retrieve the bag. During conventions, this forces me to go down to the dungeoun for more, even when I know there are sufficient quantities in circulation already. Also, a lot of guests think that the bags are souvenirs, and take them home, not realizing that they are actually stealing them. Often the bellman or front desk clerk will catch them on the way out, which is why I also find bags in the office.

But the bags are only one problem I have to solve to do this job. Two days in advance, the night auditor is supposed to order enough newspapers to cover every occupied room. For reasons that have not been sufficiently explained, this doesn't always happen, and I get fewer than I need. In that case, I have to deliver to all Hilton Honors members (a contractual obligation), and the rest of the papers are brought back to the lobby for whoever else wants one. If I'm a few short on the number needed for the HH guests, I can use some of the other papers we carry.

But this morning, there is no paper delivery at all. We have 211 rooms occupied, 151 of which are HH members, and I got 75 newspapers. Being shorted by 76 papers for a minimum delivery, there is no way to deliver them equitably, and therefore all papers will be kept downstairs. Somebody will get yelled at today, and it won't be me.