Monday, November 10, 2025
Settle Down, Now
At a hotel in Montreal, my son and DIL were in a cluster of four rooms at the end of the hall. The second night, the other three rooms were occupied by students preparing to go out after midnight for a Hallowe'en party, in and out of each others rooms noisily. It was bad enough that Ben eventually called hotel security, which improved things a little. We debated whether with would be better to go out into the hall and make the request oneself rather than call in the fuzz. Which would be more likely to escalate things? Which would be more likely to work?
Jen thought that the best solution would be to go out into the hall and saying "Our daughter is having an organ transplant tomorrow and needs to be well-rested." That seems hard to top.
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2 comments:
I find that the personal approach works very well, but your mileage may vary.
I'm recalling, but not finding, some commentary on this subject from the Coyoteblog Blog. Warren ran a company that operated campgrounds on state and federal lands, and as you can imagine there's always a mix of families with kids, birders up early, and folks wanting to swap stories around the fire into the early hours in adjacent 'sites' at such campgrounds.
He found campground hosts much better at dealing with such disturbances than park police, as the hosts approached it with a customer-service attitude of "how can we deal with this without offending any of the customers" whereas the park-police tended to go straight to "obey me or there will be unpleasant consequences for you." I wonder of hotel security has more of the customer-service mindset than the officious mindset? -- it probably differs with the personality of the individual(s) in the role.
I also think that there's a difference between dealing with people who are noisy because they are 'oblivious' to the harm they are causing vs people who are noisy because they are 'entitled'. Direct polite requests to the second-sort usually won't work, and involving security after self-help has failed is likely to invite retaliation of some sort.
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