Tuesday, September 6, 2011

Yesterday, I began blogging about a situation I came across in Las Vegas that I’d always wondered about but had never experienced—until this trip.  I left off that blog with one of my friends inside her room while her boyfriend supervised four maintenance workers who struggled to tear apart the automated door lock that had malfunctioned, locking my girlfriend in her room.

Her boyfriend arrived on the scene and used his cell phone to call for help from outside the door.  The maid he was directed to acted calm and told him she’d send someone up “in a bit” to help.  He lost his patience after explaining, for the third time, that there were people trapped inside the room.  Again, the maid told him she’d send someone up “in a bit.”  It was then that he lost his cool and barked at the maid that she needed to send hotel maintenance up immediately.  That it was unsafe to have folks locked in their room.  He pointed out that should there be an emergency, those same individuals wouldn’t be able to vacate the room.

That seemed to snap the maid out of her lack of understanding how immediate the situation was.  She sent maintenance right up.  By the time I stumbled across the scene, the workers had been struggling for over an hour to rip the locking device off the door, rendering it to a twisted mound of dissected metal pieces by the time they got it off.

Talking further with my friend, he told me that the maintenance workers had told him they’d just come from having to rip apart another of the automated door locks.  There had been individuals trapped inside that room as well.

Sheesh!

Everything ended up turning out just fine.  No one got hurt, but my girlfriend, the one who had been trapped in the room, was a bit rattled that she’d been unable to get out of her room for a spell.  That caused me wonder…. What would have happened if there had been an emergency and my girlfriend and the guest locked in the other hotel suite had needed to get out?