Missing Work (Sort of)

I almost miss work. I went back for a day today, and I remember all the fun stuff that I miss along with all the bad things.

For example, today I was going through all the cancelled reservations that had taken place earlier in the day and I noticed a cancellation for an arrival incoming today. I went around the front desk area wanting to know who cancelled the reservation. I found the girl who cancelled the reservation and we asked her why she didn't charge a cancellation fee. She said she would have, however, the lady cancelling the reservation claimed that her father had just died. I rolled my eyes and callously lectured her, claiming that she should have asked for a death certificate to be faxed over to us, at the least. Naturally, I was kidding, but I was also almost certain that the lady calling us was lying. In the hotel industry, for those of you who don't know, we have a "cancellation period". For us, our cancellation period is upto 48 hours before check-in. This cancellation policy guards revenue by making sure that there won't be mass-cancellations immediately before arrival.

Anyways, the reason I knew she was lying was because there's another hotel in the village that is often confused with our's. So I got together with everyone that was working, and we called the other hotel in the village to see if someone under the last name of that reservation had just checked into their hotel, and they had. We confirmed the last 4 digits of the credit card number, politely told the lady on the phone to forward them our heart-felt sympathies for their loss and then we slapped a (relatively large) cancellation fee on them for lying.

Moral of the story: If you're nice and honest, things work out better than if you're a hopeless liar.