The Night Shift

Being a hotel receptionist on a Friday night turned out to be quiet. I was apprehensive traipsing around streets with partying tourists, a champagne bottle broken open with shards pointing upward across a pedestrian crossing and alcoholic foam along the gutter. But the hotel itself was in a calm courtyard, a wispy light rain falling, and the clientele turned out to be eminently well behaved. A room costs over €100 per night, the front desk had tall pink orchids on it, and the lounge had a grand piano, comfortable sofas, and equally pristine laminate wood walls. My supervisor came out from a back office and shook hands, a spare man somewhat older than me in a leather vest, with an open manner and direct way of speaking with people that I liked at once. In the end I handed over room keys for two groups of guests, and showed a young English-speaking pair where to write their address when checking in, but otherwise I had practically no duties except to sit and pass the time. Which was a relief because I thought I'd need to handle abstruse and diva-esque guest requests or learn elaborate check-in or security procedures.

The guests, fellow employees, and a black-suited gentleman who was briskly striding around (the supervisor revealed discreetly afterward that he was the hotel owner), greeted the supervisor and me politely as they came and went through the lobby. Two women guests (one in a sparkling black blazer, if I recall correctly) paused to give my colleague the run-down on their evening in the revue at the Friedrichstadt Palast. After 11:30 p.m. very little went on except for security personnel coming in to chat or check in or out.

My colleague intermittently watched a German TV series about the cop beat in Mainz. The dramatis personae were e.g. a 16-year-old too drunk to go home by herself and her (per my first impression, repellent-sounding) parents unwilling to take the trouble to fetch her, a car driver who performed a suspicious manoeuvre and (when stopped) turned out to have no license, and a young man who dove into the Rhine River on a dare during a bachelor party but found that the current was too strong to swim across. I was sure that part of the dialogue must have been re-recorded in a studio after the original footage was filmed, because most of the criminal 'talent' had excellent diction and the sound quality was unimpeachable. The series was surprisingly didactic, and not in the 'don't do crime' way you'd expect. It instilled the impression that police work is not at all about handing down biblical judgments about right and wrong; instead it's about figuring out which part of the rule book to exercise in which situation, staying cool-headed, and applying compassion where it seems justified. The police officers also repeated that people who have mental health problems should seek help, because law enforcement might want to but can't fix their life situations. If the series itself is entirely ethical, however, I'm skeptical.

So on the one hand I also chatted a little with the co-worker, who revealed inter alia that he'd grown up in the GDR and that there usually aren't any security problems at the hotel except sometimes with a homeless person but that this was manageable. I skimmed the headlines of the Guardian, Rundfunk Berlin Brandenburg, the New York Times, and the Süddeutsche Zeitung, browsed the websites of The Atlantic and The New York Review of Books, and had brought along Alphonse Daudet's Lettres de mon Moulin — and enjoyed reading all that. Lettres de mon Moulin are really wonderful, engaging to read, original, and descriptive, even if from a non-French-native-speaker's perspective they contain a lot of vocabulary that I never expect to use again in my life. (One of my favourite sentences was, 'Day is the life of beings, but night is the life of things.' — I wrote that down because I liked it so much.) ...  On the other hand, I was also very much engrossed in the police show.

After 5 a.m. a cleaning lady arrived and began to get ready for her shift, eventually wheeling out the trolley in uniform with her supplies. So did another colleague who seemed to do more security-type work. The supervisor told me I could leave 30 minutes early, so I did, delighted that it was already light out but also aware of having huge circles under my eyes. (I hadn't napped the day before, which might have been a mistake, and was woken up by noise and a headache so that I didn't sleep in until noon as I'd planned. That said, it was still delightfully refreshing to be in a position for once to tell myself: No, no, don't go to sleep yet! You need to wake up late for work!) After arriving home and being greeted sleepily by Mama and Ge., who heard me from their rooms, I slept about 5 hours and afterward gradually returned to my essay writing.