Imagine working the night shift at a hotel, and you can’t go home until the person working the morning shift arrives for work. What would you do if your coworker was often very late for work?

In this story, one front desk worker is in this exact situation, and she’s very frustrated by it but feels like there’s nothing she can do but wait.

Let’s read all the details.

Tales from Two Hours of Overtime

..and counting. Or infinity hours because I’m stuck in a freaking labor prison.

So as almost any front desk agent knows, regardless of the schedule if your relief is late you have to stay overtime until either they arrive, or someone else does to cover.

Unfortunately this is a problem that seems to be unique to me at this workplace. I’m constantly getting screwed over by morning coworkers who cannot be reliably here on time.

Nobody is answering their phone.

Right now it is 7:30 AM as of this writing. My relief was supposed to be here ninety minutes ago.

Once they were 20 minutes late I started calling. No freaking answer.

I tried calling my GM another 15 minutes later. Still no answer.

I even took this to the operations director and they didn’t answer either.

She has had an epiphany.

This is a thing that is too familiar to me, because it has happened like 7-8 times in the past.

Every time morning relief is NCNS I have to wait another 2-3 freaking hours so I can go home, rest, take care of myself, then go back into the audit mines all over again unless it’s my weekend.

This repeated act of my morning relief basically messing me over has led me to an epiphany: Hotels are an inherently toxic work environment. It’s a freaking legal prison where we get sentenced based on the incompetence of our coworkers. A tightrope of not being allowed to go home until someone else gets here.

And the sad part is, there is no fix for this.

This is a good point.

It’s not like other kinds of 24-hour customer service businesses like convenience stores and fast food places where, worse comes to worse, the store could hypothetically close and at worst, customers just have to find someplace else.

No, that can’t be the case here. Because guests expect the FD to be staffed 24 hours, whether they need new towels, to check in or out, or because they’re feeling unsafe due to a stalker, loud banging sounds that could be gunshots, or whatever, WE HAVE TO KEEP SOMEONE ON DUTY AT ALL TIMES.

Even if that someone has to work 16 or even 24 hours.

I think I read a story of someone here who worked four days straight because of some stupid corporate retreat; not 32 hours across four 8-hour shifts, but 96 straight hours.

She wants out.

So I’ve started looking for other jobs, see where my two years of night audit skills can take me. Someplace where I don’t have to stay extra because some idiot decided to oversleep and their phone is on Maximum Strength Do Not Disturb.

Because when my schedule says X:XX to Y:YY, I should expect to be relieved at Y:YY.

The schedule is supposed to be a policy, not a freaking suggestion.

Whoever is supposed to be coming in for the morning shift should be fired.

If you enjoyed this post, check out this post about a man who wants to report a coworker to HR over unprofessional behavior following a missed promotion.

Let’s see how Reddit responded to this situation.

Here’s some advice.

Another hotel manager offers sympathy.

Here’s another suggestion to hopefully wake someone up.

This is awful!

This would be a good reason not to want to work the night shift.