Advantages

Working at Hotel A and Hotel B does have it's advantages. Despite the fact that the two hotels are only a few miles apart, both owned by the same company and whenever a serious maintenance issue happens at Hotel A, the maintenance man from Hotel B always comes to fix it.
Despite all of this, there is very little communication between both establishments. I know this to be true, because on several occasions I have been on the roster to work at both hotels on the same nights. Now that they've proved that they don't know how to run a hotel, I always leave it until the last minute to point out their mistakes.

Before the other Night Manager at Hotel A left, he told me why both hotels had been involved in a staff swapping party. It started off with Hotel B receiving a member of the restaurant team from Hotel A. Everyone assumed that this was because Hotel B was "short-staffed." Since that initial switch, Hotels A and B have been swapping staff like nobodies business. I am the only person who works at both hotels in general.

Anyway, before the other Night Manager left (a wise move, if ever I saw one), he told me that real reason as to why one member of staff had been shunted to Hotel B was that she had been sleeping with the chef from Hotel A's husband for a year and they had recently been found out. This had led to the chef kicking her husband out and trying to hold down a full-time job and looking after her family, right before Christmas.

Now the chef in question used to come in every morning, give me (or whoever was on) a cheerful "Hello" and ask how the night was. Since this incident, when she comes in now, all I get is a very tired, "Hello" and she always tells me that she didn't sleep very well that night and how tired she is. She was on the verge of telling me, this morning, that in the past year several members of her close family had passed away and how Christmas was going to be a sad time for them all. She was about to tell me all the details, when the Restaurant Supervisor walked in (the one from Hotel A, and he does have a modicum of sense) and she cut her story short.

So, out with the old and in with the new. As I mentioned previously, we have a new Night Manager at Hotel A. Yes, he is a migrant worker and after ten days in the job, he seems to think that it's acceptable to do very little work and spend most of the time surfing websites of his homeland (they're not currently blocked, unlike YouTube and MySpace), drinking endless amounts of coffee and listening to music on his personal CD player. I suppose I can be grateful that I only have to put up with him for one shift every week, but it's going to be a long shift.

At the moment, we have a group in who are renovating a nearby school. They come down every weekday morning at 6.30am for a continental breakfast. I knew they were due, so I went through to the Reception after half of them had walked past me on their way to the table. The chef was standing there talking to the new Night Manager and I asked him if everything was ready as they were in the restaurant waiting. Let's just say he knows the English swear words, but very little else. I swear, every time he went out of the kitchen, he kicked the door so hard, I thought he was going to put his foot through it.

At least he is off now for two days, which means my two shifts will be very peaceful indeed and I can do things my way.