The Best Thing I've Heard Anybody Ever Said to Anybody Else

I worked in a hotel one summer between semesters.

It was A.M. shift. I got there really early. For a couple of hours, it was me and the Night Auditor, whose name was James. We had four different James working there at the time. To differentiate the Night Auditor from the multiple James we had there, we referred to this James as Crazy James.

This was partly at his request, because, he said, he would say anything to anybody, and he was proud of that fact. It also owed in part to his tendency to occasionally fly off the handle for no apparent reason.

The best story to illustrate the first reason:

I had just gotten there one morning. I was getting a drawer together, and I heard Crazy James talking with a guest. The guest, I would learn later, had just checked in a couple of hours before (I got there at 4:30 each morning). Crazy James later told me that this guest had been an all around pain in the ass from the time he walked in the door. It was the second time he'd been to the desk in the couple of hours, and he'd also called James a couple of times.

"The level of the water in the toilet is too high." He was complaining at this particular moment. The complainer was a man of about fifty, rumpled, frumpled and pretty ill with the world.

"What do you mean?" Crazy James asked.

"When I'm sitting on the toilet, my penis is in the water," there was a beat, and then, "do you know what that's like?"

Can you guess at what point I stopped completely what I was doing and listened intently from the desk where I sat to the conversation on the other side of the doorway? I was also fully cognizant of the fact that Crazy James might not have been the crazier member of the conversation. I then stood up to get a full view of the situation, but also to be ready in the offhand chance that something was seriously wrong with this guest's mental makeup.

I mean, that's not something you typically discuss with strangers, even in the hotel/hospitality industry.

Our Night Auditor was able to diffuse the situation, with what was the best thing I've ever heard anybody say to anybody else:

Crazy James said: "No sir, I wouldn't. I don't reach. But to be honest, if I did, I wouldn't be complaining about it. Least of all to a hotel clerk."

"Oh," the man said, as if such an idea, while feasible and right in front of his face, had never once occurred to him. "Sorry to bother you," he said. He wandered, slump-shouldered back to his room, and we didn't hear from him again during my shift.

James quit not long after that, in the middle of his shift. He just told the security guard he was leaving, that he was tired of working there, citing all the crazy guests, the package in the toilet water man in particular, and none of us ever saw Crazy James again.