Thank you, your DNA data will help secure your… oh dear, we've lost that too I have been propositioned at midnight at a hotel door. "What's your room number?" Tired, tipsy and momentarily surprised at being accosted at the threshold of my two-night, three-star lodging, I fail to conjure an immediate answer. Am I on the third floor? Something about turning right when exiting the lifts, five or six doors …
You meet them in the lobby like civilized people and not sneak up to the room like a hooker?
A great idea. When I'm staying at a hotel with friends or family, it would be wonderfully convenient if we have to meet in the lobby any time anyone wants to visit someone else's room.
I agree with Mage. This is an idiotic misfeature.
It would be really nice if they put lift call buttons in the hallway, or tied 2-3 minutes worth of floor priority to the act of removing the keycard from the room occupation slot and opening and closing the door, so the lift would have arrived where it was needed in advance of someone walking up to the door and pushing the button, eliminating all that tiresome standing about, chatting and making friends that one otherwise does whilst waiting for the lift.
Stalker alert !!!
T'missus and I recently went to a show[1] at the local arts centre. While I was trying to self-numb in the bar beforehand, she insisted on us sitting with other people[2] and TALKING TO THEM!
She ignored my whispered comment that doing so was frightfully un-British and we should return to our previous habit of disgression and not talk to, or make eye-contact with, other people..
What is the world coming to!
[1] Alastair McGowan - an introduction to classical music. Rather a good show as it happens - combing him doing stand-up, impressions and playing the piano pretty well.
[2] And even worse, people we'd never met before and not been formally introduced to. I say!
I got trapped it the lift the other day. It visited every floor, bounced up and down a bit, threatened to open the doors, made a whole load of worrying clanking and banging noises, then went straight for the basement, turned the cab lights off, powered down and sat there sulking. At least the emergency phone still worked, but it connected me to a control centre somewhere in India. After 20 minutes of shouting and banging for security, I eventually discovered that the doors could be manually pulled open. It should have been replaced 3 years ago, but the PFI building management company puts profit before lifecycle renewal.
Failure on every level.
... the lift automatically selected your floor when you badged with your room key.
I think that's the first time I've seen "badge" used as an intransitive verb.
Our wonderful language lets us do things like that ... but I'd have expected "badged" to refer to an action performed with -- you know -- something actually called a "badge", rather than a key.
It should be explained at this point that modern elevators are strange and complex entities. The ancient electric winch and maximum capacity eight persons jobs bear as much relation to a Sirius Cybernetic Corporation ‘Happy Vertical People Transporter’, as a packet of peanuts does to the entire West Wing of the Sirian State Mental Hospital.
This is because they operate on the unlikely principle of defocused temporal perception - a curious system which enables the elevator to be on the right floor to pick you up even before you knew you wanted it, thus eliminating all the tedious chatting, relaxing, and making friends that people were previously forced to do whilst waiting for elevators.
Not unnaturally, many lifts imbued with intelligence and precognition became terribly frustrated with the mindless business of going up or down, experimented briefly with the notion of going sideways - as a sort of existential protest - demanded participation in the decision making process, and, finally, took to sulking in basements.
At this point a man called Gardrilla Manceframe rediscovered and patented a device he had seen in a history book called a staircase. It has been calculated that his most recent tax bill paid for the social security of five thousand redundant Sirius Cybernetics Workers, the hospitalisation of a hundred Sirius Cybernetics Executives, and the psychiatric treatment of over seventeen-and-a-half-thousand neurotic lifts.
He has now worked himself up into a state of terror, worrying that everything he writes here will be recorded, probed and analysed.
Don't worry - we commentards have been analysing and probing everything you write for years.
And as you've survived all that, you should have nothing to worry about from anyone else...
we commentards have been analysing and probing everything you write for years
Yeah - but were are (mostly) fairly polite and erudite[1]. Something that is not necessarily true of the Great Unwashed (or Facebook users as we now call them).
[1] Even, surprisingly, those commentards unfortunate enough to be denizens of left-pondia.
The real advantage of the old-fashioned night porter was that, after letting you & your colleagues in and turning on the lights in the lounge, he would bring you drinks & coffees from the long-closed bar. If you tipped him enough he'd even sometimes forget to add them to anyone's bill.
The real advantage of the old-fashioned night porter was that, after letting you & your colleagues in and turning on the lights in the lounge, he would bring you drinks & coffees from the long-closed bar.
Especially when you started talking, and found you were all students (we on congress), albeit from different countries. Nothing more world-peace-enhancing, and people-unifying than all getting drunk in a half lit hotel lobby/ bar. The one night porter I'm thinking of, a pimply, white-faced one in the US, told us he took the job because "the peace and quiet was ideal preparation for exams". Then again, when more students from all over the globe joined our impromptu gathering, he stayed and was a perfect host. When we exchanged emails later he shared with the group that his experiences the night before the exams were actually much better than the results of the exams itself the next day. Bless...
How do you secure your fiefdom?
[ ] I'm not stupid. It won't happen to me.
[ ] A tickbox list (like a CIS benchmark) - cover your arse
[ ] Do what you're told (thou shalt not huawei; noone ever got fired for buying IBM)
[ ] Decades of experience and a paranoid attitude
[ ] It's all about blame. I just give my security staff impossible and self-contradictory instructions they must violate.
[ ] I'm collecting stories for "On call" and "Who, me?"
[ ] Mine's a pint, please.
... is the only kind of security people want to engage with. We're still a long way from having a rational approach to risk in the real world: risk management is "health and safety gone mad" but significant adverse outcomes are met with national press coverage and demands for massive compensation - no reason to expect anything better in the unreal world.
we need to move on towards the approach based high risk industries. I've worked in the electricity transmission and gas distribution industries as well as in COMAH chemical plant and risk management has to be effective without being over bureaucratic. All 3 industries had the same problem. Workers were not being injured performing high risk activities but in peripheral activities. The one fatality which occurred when I was working there was a High Voltage engineer who died when he rolled his land rover crossing a slope, there were more injuries across all 3 industriousness from people slipping on stairs in the head office than in production plants. In all 3 industries the same approaches were rolled out to all staff. The fist was 'brothers keeper' you cannot allow a colleague to perform an unsafe activity you have an obligation to intervene and ensure that the risk is mitigated safely. the second was a 30 second risk assessment. This did not have to be documented but whenever you were performing a new activity or the environment had changed spend 30 seconds to think, what can hurt me, what happens if this task goes wrong. In all cases this lead to a reduction of accidents and injuries. Across the board rules were issues about simple behavioural changes, not using the stairs when both hands are full stops uncontrolled fall, if you have a free hand for the banister you may wrench a shoulder but you wont end up at the bottom of a flight of stairs with 2 broken arms and a broken jaw. Likewise banning open topped drink containers stops coffee tea etc being split on the beautiful marble corridors and stairs, preventing slips and falls. We can take the same approach to manage behaviour around IT systems and data management. Think before you complete a form on a website, open an attachment etc. it should;d be common sense but its not and thee needs to be a culture change driven from the top of organisations, it is not something that the IT department can drive. In all 3 industries I mentioned this was implemented by the Board of directors and cascaded down metrics on accidents and injuries were shared through the whole company not hidden, its hard to expose your weaknesses and the whole company gave a massive groan when the sign on the gate went from 241 days without a reportable accident to 1 but there was a renewed drive to improve things.
An interesting take on security, but you're talking about industrial environments. Security is something people do actually pay attention to in those environments, because people have died in industrial accidents.
People have also died in elevators, but that is not something anyone pays attention to when going back to their hotel room. Personally, if I'm going back to my room after a well-liquored evening, the security guy has one thing to check : do I have my keycard. After that, I will take offense and make one hell of a stink, and if it has to go to calling the manager, it will go there. I paid good money for that room, no two-bit sentinel is going to stand between me and my bed.
Sorry, it is all my fault, looking old meant that I was drinking unchallenged by the time I was 11; and I pretty much looked about 40 from age 16 until I WAS in my 40's.
My last GF (before meeting my wife) got challenged to prove she was old enough for alcohol; it wasnt pub policy ,it was just that she looked about 12 stood next to me, even though she was 34.
A bunch of fellow students went to a beer bar in Arizona. After we had been seated one of the students said that the bouncer wanted to see me. So I went over and he asked me if I was over 21. I started to pull out my wallet to prove that I was over 21 but he waved it away and just wanted me to state I was over 21. Since I was I said so.
None of the other students I was with were over 21.
"None of the other students I was with were over 21."
it may not be the case in this instance, but this may have been the door staff working for the benefit of their employer whilst superficially enforcing the law. If the bouncer suspects a group contains underage drinkers, but the group is otherwise well behaved and amenable then checking the one person they suspect will pass the age checks is a wise move. Any undercover plod will see the door staff apparently enforcing the rules, thus not imperilling the owner's licence, whilst a group of customers is not shown the door because some are not old enough to satisfy local laws.
Alistair Dabbs, clearly you have a big ass chip on your shoulder. Ripping about door staff, that is there to keep people from getting robbed, raped and stabbed. I have worked at night clubs and known plenty of other people that worked various security jobs over my 50+ years. Door staff have to deal with the worst of society all the time. There is always some scum bag trying to drug others, lift peoples phones, coats, sneak into places, and hurt others. The scum put a lot into their efforts some times, some security people (in any roll) get jaded by the sheer amount of BS they have to deal with, to the point you just expect everyone to be the worst - because we see it so often. There are stabbings every day in clubs across the UK, and the most likely person to try and save someone is the security person, not your buddy/coworker or date. So get off your high horse, if it wasn't for the large amount of scum, people wouldn't have to work as security staff. That Guy at the hotel making sure you are a guest, has likely had to toss several people over the last month that were there to rob and rape - but you're to stuck in your drunk head to think about anybody besides yourself.
if someone says 34, and there is no 34, rooms start at 134 or c34, that's a no brainer. Similar asking someone what their birthday is, if they can't remember of the top of their head, it likely isn't their ID. if they don't have a hotel card/key (which he didn't ask for) that would be easy to, but just by asking - will actually make a would be thief want to leave and not deal with it, while someone wanting in the room will - which is why he was let in.
Hey - my post is very disliked, awesome, lol. Doesn't mean I'm wrong though.
if someone says 34, and there is no 34, rooms start at 134 or c34, that's a no brainer.
Good chance they (as with Mr Dabbs) were a little scramble brained and got digits flipped or weren't sure of the floor #. I've had to check on my room number once during a long conference, no clue what room I was booked into or even what floor.
Similar asking someone what their birthday is, if they can't remember of the top of their head, it likely isn't their ID.
For the better part of 50 years I've not had to think much about my DOB. For the last couple of years I do have to think about it. For the last 50 years my brother has not once remembered his birthday, even when he has one of the best reminders of what day it is (no one else forgets it when told). The older you get the harder it is to switch tracks with the brain, especially if you're not expecting such a question. The faster they answer that question may be a good sign they've been rehearsing the answer. Someone over 30 answers that question straight away? Check. Someone been out on the town doesn't answer it? They're probably hoping their hearing will recover, mind all over the place, and never heard or understood your question.
but just by asking - will actually make a would be thief want to leave and not deal with it, while someone wanting in the room will - which is why he was let in.
I used to teach people this. If you look like you're supposed to be there no one will question you. If you look out of place everyone will question you. Go around a suburban environment in a hard hat and safety vest with a clip board and you'll get pretty much whatever information you ask for, if you appear confident. Almost no one will even question why someone is walking around the streets wearing a brand new super-clean almost fluorescent-white hard hat. You're more likely to be robbed by staff anyway, or staff are more likely to be an accomplice. That security hero who does all that dangerous work you were talking about? He ain't loyal to you. You give him the worst job, pay him SFA and treat him like shit. Of course he's going to be wanting to 'skim off the top' so-to-speak (I know not all guards are like this).
If I want to walk into somewhere I'm not supposed to be, to get something I'm not supposed to have, you can bet the first thing I will work on is making people ignore me because they have no doubt that I am supposed to be there and I have every right to take whatever it is I am after.
Hey - my post is very disliked, awesome, lol. Doesn't mean I'm wrong though.
Doesn't make you right either. That said, I share your sentiment - the more often I get massively downvoted the more I know I'm the only one on here with any brains! :)
Door staff at a nightclub in Sheffield.
If a pretty woman turns up in a low cut top they make her face them when touching their toes so the pervs can get a good look down her cleavage.
If she is wearing a short skirt, she has to face away.
I knew that I was going to be refused entry the moment I mentioned this to them, but by that point I didn't want to go into the establishment.
I knew that I was going to be refused entry the moment I mentioned this to them, but by that point I didn't want to go into the establishment.
You shouldn't mention this to the door goons, but to the gentlemen accompanying those ladies. At the very least there will be pointed complaints to management and with a bit of luck one or more of the gentlemen will be up to the task of taking those goons out.
Had their outer doors locked "after hours", and the room key card would let you in pretty easily (of course it had to be inserted correctly). The problem is that if you have an impatient SWMBO who wants to get to the room quickly for whatever reason, and has forgotten her card which you TOLD her that she might need, it becomes an interesting experience to avoid being beaten up and cursed at. Alas, life goes on, and we all adapt.
Of course, some of the antics of "security" (at least in the USA) are to prevent the inevitable sue ball that some maligned person will put forward when they were accosted by a maligned member of the public. And so it goes.....
I remember the time I was staying in a pub/guest house. Had been all week. Came back later than usual on the Friday and was stopped at the door by the bouncer. Not allowed in because I had a hoodie on (hood was down mind you). Didn't matter I had my door card (which I waved under his nose). Good job he didn't ask me to touch my toes.....
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