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Most customer service workers learn pretty quickly that being polite goes a long way.

However, every now and then, someone comes along who seems determined to test just how far that politeness will stretch.

That’s what happened when this hotel employee came back from a few days off and read a long list of concerns about one particular guest.

At first, the man just seemed overly friendly and full of excuses. However, the more she dealt with him, the more convinced she became that he was trying to manipulate everyone around him.

Eventually, she stopped playing along and started enforcing the rules.

Read on to see what happened.

The Professional Scammer, or the Only time I Refused to use my Customer Service Voice

I work at a smallish, family-owned hotel in a coastal city in Sweden.

We’re not a high-end hotel, so we sometimes attract some…. questionable people, even though our core clientele of regulars are very lovely retirees for the most part.

This guest is not one of those.

The first thing she saw was a note about the guest.

I come in one morning to replace the evening staff after a couple of days off, and I see a huge wall of text left by my colleague explaining one of the guests.

The note was saying how he’s very friendly to the point of being disturbing, and so EXTREMELY talkative (okay, that happens). They also said he talked about his life nonstop to the receptionist, including how he has a girlfriend who’s 16 years of age.

In Sweden, the age of consent is 15, so what I’m reading about IS legal, but it’s not a thing culturally accepted as moral. And from what I read and see, this man is in his 40s. So I immediately don’t take a shining to this guest, even despite all the other red flags my colleague has raised about late payments, etc.

Then, she met him.

Then I meet the man… and good lord. I grew up with an addict in the family. I’ve also spent a lot of my 20s around addicts. So, I know the way they talk, the way they try to manipulate people around them.

He hit all the marks.

He was extremely friendly and “charming” (the same way a cheap bottle of rum is charming), but! I was wrong!

His wife wasn’t 16. My colleague worded it weirdly. It was his wife of 16 years, as in 16 years together, but that bit of misinformation actually gave me the stones to not treat a guest with the same level of customer service I usually do.

After getting weird vibes, she did a little research, and oh boy!

We did some research on him after he failed to pay, then managed to pay (somehow, by calling a friend in front of me and lying to this friend about his situation), then failed to pay, then again managed to pay for his nights by using a long-time resident of the hotel as a bank after drinking with him for a couple of nights!

And turns out! He was once on a TV show that “showcases” (inhumanely exposes) people with extreme debt and “helps” them manage it, and he actually “won” by being the most debt-riddled person ever included in this TV series!

But unlike all the other people exploited on this horrible show, he seems to have been the one person actually deserving of ridicule, after doing my research. I won’t go into why, but… compared to all the others, I feel no sympathy for him. Because all of his sob stories he tried telling me and my colleagues just further confirmed my suspicions that it was all an act.

By this point, he was asking about who would be working.

He tried over and over again to not pay for his nights at the hotel. My colleagues had a hard time telling him no, being firm, and usually I do too! I’m an eternal people pleaser (part of why I’m so great working at this hotel), but all of him just put me off.

So for the first time in my life, I became firm. I became ******* hard. Whenever he tried an excuse, I met it with the firmness of policy. We need payment NOW, or I will kick you out.

Whenever he tried the sympathy card, I became busy. I had other work to do. Or I told him straight up I don’t care. I would look at him witheringly, then stop engaging.

It came to a point where he met my manager and asked who was working the next shift, and she said my name. He went quiet and then asked, “Is that the red-headed lady?”

Luckily, her manager had her back.

She said yes, and he said, “She’s quite harsh, isn’t she?”

And my manager smiled happily at him and replied, “Yes! Isn’t she great?”

She knew about him beforehand and would never have given him that information if she didn’t know I would be okay with it, btw. I had already informed her about our interactions and that I preferred to be working if he was there because he was such a slimy ******.

Then he tried stealing from us.

When she saw the hangers, she knew he was in trouble.

Before, we couldn’t get him on anything that would justify us banning him. Literally just weird vibes and being a slimy **. Because he always managed to pay somehow, right?

But his LAST day with us, he couldn’t pay as usual, so I forced him to vacate his room (as before, had to do this multiple times…) before payment was made. But THIS TIME, oh lord…

So on top of all his gathered stuff were eight identical clothes hangers….. the exact ones we have at the hotel, which we special order from a company that only delivers to hotels. I look down at the hangers, then back up at him and say,”Those are our hangers.”

And this ** LAUGHS, starts up with some weak excuse trying to be charming about it. Then, he says, “Oh well, I bought some clothes the other day. Wasn’t sure if these were mine or yours.”

Now, they could blacklist him.

I tell him straight, “No. Those are ours.”

And I reach for them. He tries to argue back to keep them, and then another colleague comes by asking what the problem is, and he IMMEDIATELY gives the hangers up to me, still trying to laugh it up as a misunderstanding. But, I spoke to the cleaning staff that went to his room, and all the hangers were mysteriously absent from his room.

The laziest con ever conned! Sad. Well, at least that gave us a proper excuse to blacklist him.

Fortunately, the man never returned.

The dumbest ************ I’ve ever run into. Not even the worst in terms of me being sad or abused by a guest, but literally the one situation that taught me to stand up for myself for once. Not be such a people pleaser. It taught me to act properly when I have bad vibes about a guest, no matter how deep the perfect people pleaser customer service persona runs.

So yeah, the schmoozing scammer never did return, but he did teach me a valuable lesson… 😌

So let’s pour one out for him. A sour wine, into the sink! ♥️

Wow! Some people are so uncouth.

It’s hard without a valid reason.

This is so true!

Very sad, but true.

Again, it’s hard to kick someone out without a good reason.

Hotels can be tough places to work.

Even though most people don’t show up looking for a fight, every now and then someone comes along with an excuse for everything and a solution for nothing.

Fortunately, this employee saw through the act and stopped letting the customer waste everyone’s time. In the end, the attempted theft only confirmed what she had suspected all along.

It’s a shame hotel employees have to deal with people like this, but anyone who has worked in hospitality knows these situations happen more often than they should.