Next time you’re staying at a Manhattan hotel, here are some things that it’s better not to do.
Don’t ask if you’re allowed to reserve the elevator so you don’t have to ride up with “those people.” Don’t angrily demand to take a boat to the Empire State Building. And don’t immediately avail yourself of the facilities in your room, then call down screaming to the front desk, claiming that the housekeeper has defecated in your toilet and you’d like a voucher for a free breakfast, please.
It appears there are few jobs more soul-crushing than working as a New York hotel concierge.
Locals Anna Drezen and Todd Dakotah Briscoe spent a combined seven years in the hospitality trenches, and the pals have gathered their most hilarious anecdotes and behind-the-scenes dirt in a new book, “How May We Hate You?,” out now.
It’s based on a blog the friends started after finding themselves working service jobs to survive as they pursued careers in stand-up and improv comedy, and it’s full of tales of rude guests, clueless foreigners and tantrum-throwing divas.
“The hotel industry is set up to make people behave in a certain way,” Drezen says. “The hotels’ message is, ‘Take a load off, we’ll take care of it. Do whatever you want to us. Punch us in the mouth. We’re cool.’ ”
Briscoe, 31, worked mostly for VIP clients at a large chain hotel, and Drezen, 28, toiled at a variety of smaller, midlist places. Between them, they’ve worked at some 40 area lodges. (Out of privacy concerns, they won’t name any, though.)
“I’d say about 80 percent of guests are great, and the interactions are perfectly fine,” Briscoe says. “Then there are the 20 percent that you really remember, where the people are rude or willfully ignorant.”
One common occurrence: an out-of-towner asking for directions, then condescendingly disputing them. Or asking for a dinner recommendation, then pulling out a phone and looking up the eatery on Yelp before pooh-poohing the idea.
And then there are the prostitutes. Briscoe, being a man, often got asked where to find them, while Drezen, being a woman, didn’t. Most of those asking were male, but one time a cougar-ish woman did inquire.
“She called from her room and wanted to know where a good party was, so we recommended clubs,” says Briscoe. “Then she wanted to know where a gentleman companion could be found. I had no advice for her beyond Craigslist.”
Another time, the “loudmouthed star of a popular reality show involving children dancing” showed up and began making excessive demands. (But only through her assistant. She refused to speak to the staff.) She asked to have her hair done, and Drezen located a stylist who was willing to come to her room.
“[The stylist and assistant] went upstairs and an hour later, they came down looking like they’d been beaten,” she says. “And the [actress] came down looking exactly the same. The stylists were like, ‘Yeah, I don’t know what happened up there, but we’re never coming back.’ ”
Briscoe had an alarming run-in with a presidential candidate a few years ago.
“I had to deal with one of her chief advisers when he downloaded a bunch of her important, confidential documents onto our public computer, and I had to show this head of presidential campaigns how to log out of Yahoo mail and to empty the trash on the computer,” Briscoe recalls of the woman, whose name he won’t give. (Hillary, is that you?) “It was alarming.”
Drezen worked in one hotel that had been converted from apartments, leaving a few grandfathered-in residents as permanent guests. One mysterious, toothless woman who called herself “Princess” liked to hang around the lobby and watch guests during the check-in process.
“She’d give you unwrapped mints and shelled peanuts covered with lint from her pocket,” says Drezen, who has left the hotel world and now works as a writer/editor for Cracked.com. “One time, her robe was sort of open and I had to close it for her. All the guests were like, ‘This is New York? I hate it.’ ”
“People ask, ‘Are these stories really true?’ ” says Briscoe, who currently works as an editor and producer at a Manhattan media company. “But you’re meeting thousands of people a week, [so] you’re guaranteed one of them will be a crazy person.”