Mudslinging

A question came up, which I posted on Facebook, about the vilification of Nancy Pelosi. My best friend responded, but instead of answering the question, he offered me more labels. I don't care about labels, I just want information, and I said so. Enter my brother, who decides to rub Jeff's nose in the fact that he didn't provide any real information. Jeff's not the kind who likes his opinions disrespected, and, with both of us objecting to his lack of an answer, he unfriends us both, complete with name-calling. Scott doesn't notice, and continues the nose-rubbing, this time complaining about the name-calling along with everything else.

I'm not sure what to think about all this. Once upon a time, Jeff and I could discuss things we disagreed about without needing to convince the other we were right. That's the kind of discussions I like. You tell me why you think what you think, I'll tell you why I think what I think, and that's good enough. It's hard to do that with Scott. Scott must persuade you that his point of view, his opinion, his understanding is the correct one. To our family, particularly our spouses, I refer to this as "he has to win". But we're getting better at talking with each other. I doubt Jeff and Scott will ever be able to talk civilly. Both are too stubborn.

Jeff moved to the land of Far Away (just this side of Far, Far Away), and Facebook is our constant contact. I like knowing about the mundane in his life, even if all he does is complain about the weather. But I miss him. We just don't see each other often enough, so the lack of Facebook leaves a void.

And I still don't have the dirt on Pelosi.

Scott objected to my use of the phrase "he has to win." He felt that he came across like Tonya Harding and that I was blaming him for Jeff's departure. So we discussed what I meant by the phrase, which wasn't easy for me because, in my mind, the phrase perfectly described situations I had observed. I suggested the word 'confrontational,' and he liked and understood that one, so I tried using it in this post. In context, it didn't work. It didn't describe what I was trying to say. I thought about 'contentious', which is closer both linguistically and contextually, but it had a connotation of belligerence that didn't fit. Scott honestly believes he's doing a service by convincing people he's right. He's not out to get you.

I had to laugh, though, when I realized that with all his complaining and pressuring me to make adjustments, the little bastard was trying to win again. In fact, I've been telling that as a funny story to some of my co-workers.

He did convince me of one thing, tho. An economy of language doesn't work if the reader can't understand what you're talking about. I use language that I think is implicit in order to shorten the story, but it winds up being too oblique or esoteric to be of any real communicative value.

So in an effort aimed at clarity, I have changed this post once again in order to

1) leave no misunderstanding about what I mean when I say "he has to win," and

2) make it clear that Jeff was reacting to both of us, not just one of us.

And if Scott doesn't like it, tough! I'm not changing it again.

Jeff did not just unfriend us. He deleted his Facebook account.

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.

Okay, here's the real scoop (but don't tell anyone.)

Ever since the Knicks told the press that they'd lost their game to the Thunder because the ghosts in the hotel had kept them awake all night, interest in the ghost stories at our hotel has gone up considerably. I personally get asked about them a lot, and I've decided that it would make a good blog post, so here goes.

The NBA teams usually come in pretty late, and they have a lot of equipment and personal luggage, so on those nights a couple of the daytime guys will come in and help out. On this particular night, the Knicks were arriving right at shift change, right at the beginning of my shift, so Bossman and a couple of other guys were there to take care of them while I took care of the other arriving guests. I actually got very busy.

Since it was still relatively early, a couple of the players decided they wanted to go out to one of the bars in Bricktown. They were waiting out on the front sidewalk for a taxi as I came out running to go get someone's car. I was halfway down the front sidewalk on the way to the parking garage when one of them shouted "Hey!"

I turned around and came back to them. "Yessir?"

"Is this place really haunted?"

I'm to busy at this time to start telling stories, so I just said, "We're not allowed to talk about it." They stiffened up and their eyes got real big. The taxi pulled up just at that moment, and I turned around and continued my run to the garage.

It actually is true that we're not supposed to talk about the ghost stories. AFOM used to keep a journal of things that have happened since the hotel re-opened, but the GM confiscated it, telling him, "This cannot exist." Now AFOM keeps a new journal at home.
The taxi drivers, however, are the worst about telling ghost stories. Not only do they love doing it, but the stories have nothing to do with the things that actually happen here. And now these two basketball players have a taxi taking them to get drinks. This can't be good.

Two nights later, a former co-worker sends me a newspaper article via Facebook about the Knicks blaming their loss on the ghosts in the hotel. Then, minutes later, I saw a promo for the news saying they'd be talking about the same thing. I called my dad. "Hey Dad! Watch channel four tonight. There's going to be a funny story about the hotel."
When I got to work that night, I told the security guys, "We were on channel four tonight."
They said, "We were on every channel tonight."
I walked out front and found Bossman at the counter. I said, "We made the local news tonight."
He said, "We made the national news tonight."
Now this can be good news or bad news. On the one hand, lots of people think its fun and exciting to stay in a haunted hotel, and we could get a lot of business from it. On the other hand, NBA players are very superstitious, and we don't want to lose a lucrative contract.

The reason Bossman was there was because the Spurs were coming in. (You know, the team with the gorgeous redhead.) We weren't busy otherwise, so I actually got to help this time. The Knicks' coach had tripped over the tiny little step at the west entrance, so it was my job to say "Good evening. Welcome. Watch your step" to these towering men who kept asking me, "Is this place really haunted?"
Our VIP liason is a tiny little thing, half as tall as the guys surrounding her. As she was passing out the keys they kept asking her, "Is this place haunted?", to which she emphatically replied, "Don't worry. I don't have any of you on that floor."

There is no "that" floor. Stuff happens on every floor. But only for people who have no clue that there might possibly be ghosts in the hotel.

Over the next few nights I found out more stuff about the Knicks' stay. One of the security guys told me that one of the guys complaining to the press about the ghosts was only on the court for three minutes, the other was on the bench all night. He also said that if the team had gone to bed the night before the game instead of staying up with the women, the beer, and the 4am chicken wings from room service, they might have won.
But the funniest part was that the coach, knowing that he had a nervous player on his team, had hired one of our morning bellmen to go up to that player's room and move his furniture.
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I went down to HR one Thursday morning and told HRBossette that I thought the Thunder would do pretty well against the Lakers that night.

"Oh?"

"Yeah, I went up and down the halls with a tape recording of a baby crying last night."

She gave me a look of abject horror.

"I'm just kidding."

She grabbed her chest and started huffing as if she'd just survived a heart attack. Though her concern was real, we did have a good laugh over my little joke. (She and I have always had a good rapport. Fortunately. As evidenced by the fact that I still have my job.)

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Mood Indigo

I gotta break out of this funk.

Between the weather, and this thing with the brother, and the lack of time and money to do what I want to do, I just can't seem to get motivated to do anything constructive. It doesn't help that they're screwing around with my schedule at work just at the time that I need some normalcy.

NO. Nononono. Don't play the blame game. Turn off the computer, take a shower, put on a sweater, go out to the studio and figure out what needs to be done in the next 38ish hours that you have before you have to go back to work. And stop thinking about the things that just make you want to crawl in a hole. You simply don't have time for this.

Okay, I can do this. I think.

Belief in Santa Claus Is Not A Value

I unfriended my brother on Facebook.

He said something that offended me so much that I just decided I didn't want to deal with him for a while.

The thing is, I don't know why it hurt me so much. He didn't really say it about me; he said it about a version of me that only exists in his own head. Before, I was able to just dismiss whatever it was that he said about this other Ron, ignore it, even if I didn't like it. Not this time.

Several years ago, when Rosie O'Donnell had her daytime talk show, she talked about how much she liked reading about herself in the tabloids. She said that since none of the stuff in the tabloids had anything to do with her real life, it was like reading about a fictional character, Tabloid Rosie, who led a much more interesting life than she did.

I don't feel the same way about Tabloid Ron. Tabloid Ron, to me, is a smothering blanket that I must fight my way out of. I explained something like this to him the night I came out to him. Instead of just telling him I was gay, I actually took him out to my favorite club in order to "blow the sides out" of the box he had me trapped in.

Now, I have a tabloid Scott, too-- a version of Scott filtered by my interpretation of my experience with him. Scott is a force unto himself. He's got to dominate every conversation and be the center of attention in every room. Everyone is entitled to his opinion, and no one is allowed to have an opinion of their own. For him, it's a competition, and he's got to win. Any dissenting opinion will be punished: maybe not now; maybe 20 years in the future.
He'll remember what you said (or something like what you said, or maybe something someone else said that he attributes to you, or maybe he'll just take the words you said and jumble them around so that they can become something he can gripe about for the rest of your life), he just won't have ever known what you meant. He's simply not interested. You can try to explain, but it's a futile effort. He doesn't care what you think; he only cares about what he thinks about what he thought you said. This is the womb of Tabloid Ron.

Scott said once that he's a person who gets in trouble because he likes to ask "why". He doesn't. Instead, he asks "whether", which is a much more limiting question. "Whether" is a cage the truth must break out of before it can be itself. But breaking out of the cage requires a dissenting opinion, which is always going to be seen as an attack, and which, as I've already said, will be punished. It also requires a lot of words, all of which will be misunderstood, and every half dozen (or fewer) will require at least half a page of rebuttal... each. The rebuttal(s) will not have anything to do with what you said (meant). If you try to clarify, eventually you will find yourself drowning in quicksand.

Over the last few years I've come up with some guidelines for online communication.
1. Only answer answerable questions. Keep it short and to the point.
2. Do NOT respond to opinion. He's entitled to an opinion (even if you aren't), and it's just an expression of where his head is at at the moment. Comments are unnecessary.
3. If he asks for an opinion, approach with caution. Usually it's a trap. Keep it short and to the point. Remember the quicksand.
4. He loves "chasing rabbits". Don't follow him.

Needless to say, this severely limits our communication. At least online. But he lives almost 12 hours away, and Facebook and email are the easiest ways to keep in touch, especially with my schedule.

Somehow, though, when we talk on the phone, everything works itself out. Even more so than in person. Weird, huh? And this time, I had provoked him into wanting to know my point of view on our points of contention. So we talked. And talked and talked and talked. We talked about our different perceptions of things that had been said or done in the past. ("Christie sent you an email about..." "And I gave her a snarky answer because I thought it was you." "Yeah. Why did you do that?" "I didn't think you seriously wanted an answer. You were just looking for a reason to grind my face in the mud." "Ron, I'm always looking for an answer.") I explained that I care very little for debate, but do enjoy exchanging ideas, and that I feel his communication style makes me feel that my opinions aren't worth anything to him. He explained that it's not his intent to make me feel bad; he's just trying to pull out more information. All this took about four hours.
Anyway, as usual we've ironed things out for a while. And while we were talking, Scott got a new friend request, which he accepted.

Things I'll Never get Around To, Chapter 1

The subject of a T-shirt I want to make came up in a discussion a while back. For years I've had the idea to make a T-shirt reading "Amberfimbie and Crotch, " just to see if anyone notices. Gaby suggested that we should make two Ts, one with Amberfimbie, the other with Crotch.

I get dibs on the Amberfimbie.

Holidays

My brother, his wife(ish) and his daughter came to visit for the holidays. I had four days off work so that I could visit with them while they were here (unlike last year, when I had to work almost every night.) Because of his schedule, we actually celebrated Christmas on New Years Eve. This is normal for us. One year we had Chrismas ten days early, another it was in February.

Earlier that day, we all went out to eat at a local steakhouse. While we were hovering around the salad bar, I asked Christie to do something for me. When we got back to the table, she upset the vegetable equilibrium. Yes, that's right; she spilled the beans. She started asking questions about the wedding. So now my parents know...for sure. They might have guessed or suspected already. I'm not sure.

Anyway, now that it's out in the open, I guess I might expect one or the other to ask questions, maybe. Eventually. Or not. I can't tell.