Working the old hotel

The St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco. I actually enjoyed this, sort of. I was a Food and Beverage Night Auditor. I worked the graveyard shift with two other guys. Our home base, where we actually worked, was the deserted accounting office where all the clerks and the Controller were during the day. One of the three guys tried to convince us that he was the boss, but I checked that out with the Assistant Controller and was told we three were equals. Pissed him off. (He worked a full day shift in the US Post Office and slept under a desk in our office when he could and slept in his van in the Post Office parking lot before and after his shift at the hotel. He only went home on weekends and the two days off he had at the hotel during the week.) We had a main frame computer and would enter and balance all of the five restaurants transactions plus all the banquets for the day. Even on a incredibly busy day/night we were done by three. We usually would turn the lights off for a while and snooze under the desks. We did have a giant chess tournament going on among the staff. We three played and read books to outplay each other and the individual restaurant managers would come to try their game on us. A couple of the security guards and a couple of the servers were involved too.

                                                                           The front desk manager played as well I think.

We didn't have one of these. (My grandmother did. I can remember playing on it as a kid.) Anyway, the three us at the St. Francis were incredible on the calculator. You had to run these enormous tapes and balance everything. Quite a few years later, I won a ten-key competition at the Westin Bonaventure Hotel staff Olympics. You didn't realize hotel skills were so rarefied?

They wiped down the Lobby with Old Gold every night and there was a guy that washed all the coins for the front desk cashiers for the next morning.