I'm on night shift right now. That means I'll be dozing off at the computer while guests trickle in until the wee hours. Lauren will relieve me at six and I'll go home to sleep for a few hours until it's time to get up and clean some more rooms! This hostelier lifestyle is really glamorous.

There's one major thing that happened this week that Lauren neglected to post so I'll cover it now:

The elevator in our building is a constant point of contention. It's a terribly old, wooden compartment (with perhaps the most colorful graffiti in town) that has dutch doors inside and a normal door on each floor. It won't move unless all doors are closed and unaware guests often leave them open, much to our neighbor's discontent. Well, I wish I could say our biggest problem was neighbor complaints.

This week, someone got stuck. Someone got stuck on our floor. At first, I thought Lauren was dropping a drum beat on the boxy bag of laundry that was just delivered but then I realized the pounding was coming from the elevator shaft. We were very lucky in that it wasn't a guest but it was our very trusty laundry man who, I'm quite afraid, may be skipping our stop in the future.

After about 2.3 seconds of sheer panic, I ran down to the ally-neighbor who pulled out this magic piece of paper with the answers to the universe's problems on it. I started to wonder if they have a file folder dedicated to the elevator crib sheet but a man was trapped and I don't know how to say "crib sheet" in Spanish. We went to the basement to the elevator machine room, cut the power, dropped the break, and MANUALLY cranked the cables.

The man was sweating like Jordi Cortada and I'm pretty sure I saw a new rendering of the male genitalia on the door frame, but our dependable laundry man was freed after a slow ride to the main floor. At the very least, now we know what to do if this happens again. And I'm sure this will happen again.