Craziness

Tonight around 10:30, I looked at my manager and declared that we needed a little excitement. She was most definitely not pleased with me... especially after I suggested we open a bottle of cleaning fluid (you know - so that we'd have to evacuate the building). She said I should sit quietly and NOT wish for excitement.

Fast-forward an hour...

One of our two automated wake-up systems crashed. This means that instead of people setting wake-ups themselves, they were transferred to our operators, who then had to set them in the computer. It's not really a difficult or time consuming process, but in one half hour we were forecast to have 350 calls and ended up with over 650. I had to page our on-call IT person, who was remarkably pleasant for someone who had obviously just been woken up. And 15 minutes after I realized there was a problem, it was fixed. Yay!

We got a call from a man who was angry that pizza delivery at his hotel wouldn't bring him alcohol. He was demanding to speak to the manager. It turns out he wanted the drinks delivered because the bar at the food court cut him off after only 8 drinks! We sent the manager and security.

Overflowing toilet in high-strung woman's room. Need I say more? OK... phone calls every 5 minutes until we sent the manager out to her. That's all I'll say.

And my final call of the night was to our pest control department: "please don't laugh at me - I'm only the messenger. a man says there's a mountain lion out near building 4 that reared up on its hind legs when he got off his motorcycle." To which the nice man replied, "let me guess - he was at Bike Week up in Daytona all day and he's been in the wild horse saloon all day?" In all honesty, it could've been a Florida panther. They have been known to pop up around here from time to time. But a mountain lion? C'mon people -- we're below sea level here!

The moral of the story, as my manager was so kind as to point out: be careful what you wish for!