Captions Sunday!

Three more captions from Dolores Azul. Excellent work. Again, all three short-story length. Enjoy!

Holiday In Plain Sight!!!!

Can an introvert rise up the corporate ladder? I’m proof that you can. I am also proof that it takes its toll! I am also proof that that it takes money to get what you want—even if what you want is to be POOR!

That doesn’t make ANY sense! What do I mean? I’ll explain...

You CAN be shy, and still be a “People Person”. I’m good enough with people that I was pulling down six figures in income a year. But I didn’t SPEND most of that money! I lived way, WAY below my means, and used what I saved to buy real estate. I even have shares in a hotel chain! The hotel chain, of course, manages itself—I mean that I don’t have to manage it—and I’ve hired good people to manage my other properties, who I keep in contact online.

Living for years on a tiny fraction of my income, I got USED to it! That convinced me I didn’t need the corporate world any longer to live the life I want! I set up a very modest trust fund for...myself! For my OTHER self! Most of the fund pays for a basement apartment in a twelve-unit I own just off the bus lines. The rest is for food and clothing—the weekly budget I set up for food is what I used to spend on ONE business lunch! The only “luxury” item I have in my apartment is a tanning bed—so I can “revert” back to my “natural” coloring!

Two weeks after resigning from the corporate rat-race, I used the I.D. for my “Other Self” and hired on as a housekeeper in one of the hotels I own stock in!

I am deeply ashamed of what I have done—that’s why I did it! That’s what I wanted! There is no real reason to be ashamed of being a “housekeeper” in a hotel, but that’s how I feel! There is real skill involved in cleaning a hotel room (something none of my former corporate colleagues will ever learn, or admit to), but once you know the routine, your life becomes—routine—mindless and routine! Just what I wanted. I also have demonstrated to me, again and again: NOBODY PAYS ATTENTION TO THE HELP. Often my former colleagues in their suit-and-ties and business suits will stay in the hotel, and walk right by me with my housekeeping cart. They DON’T recognize me! The best, though, is when my company hosts a seminar in our hotel and I have to serve lunch! Young executives with an inflated opinion of themselves—who used to be proteges of mine!— airily ask for more butter, and I have to obey! None of that makes ANY sense, but I am both scared to be there, scared to be ME, and I just LOVE it!

Some people would say that my biggest thrill would be...just sick, and I wouldn’t blame them...but I both hope and dread that a former colleague will actually LOOK at me, for once, and see that it’s ME. The rumor—no, the REPORT— of what they’ve seen will spread like wildfire through the corporate world!! All the people I used to work with will see that I’ve fallen deep into the ranks of the “99-Percent” and into “Abject Poverty”! At that point, no matter that I have more assets and own more property than the most of them, I will be trapped in the work and life I’ve chosen, and I don’t know if I DON’T or DO truly want that!

Even though being a housekeeper in a hotel is very hard work, and puts you in a social station very close to the bottom; knowing every day I have to do menial work, obey hotel managers with a fraction of my education, and obey hotel guests with a fraction of my intelligence keeps me, while I’m working, the wrong 30 minutes away from having to run to a deserted restroom to ‘jill’ myself off!!!——but the bread loaves and other kitchen supplies still need to be brought in...so I carry on, like the uneducated blue-collar maid I appear to be, and which makes up my life from now on...

Work-Release In My Own Hotel!!

Maricopa County, Arizona has the city of Scottsdale in it. Scottsdale is a great restaurant town, and the hotels are reportedly excellent too. I was in negotiations with another hotel chain to buy one of their hotels and wanted to see their Scottdale location firsthand. I am a great believer in “Getting Down in the Trenches” and seeing an organization from the ground up. When you look from the top down, and are given the V.I.P. tour, you miss WAY too much! If I have been able to make our hotel chain profitable, it’s because I am a “trench-diver”, even if that means going undercover. Investigating my own hotels only means dressing the part, dressing down of course. Most of the hotel workers—who as far as I’m concerned REALLY make the hotels go—have no idea what I look like, so that makes the task easy.

Investigating a hotel our organization wants to buy, though, means—going undercover.

I love making profit, I genuinely love seeing people working with me making a good living (working on THAT one, constantly!), and I love seeing familiar customers coming back! But the thing I love most about my executive job is, yes, Going Undercover! I’ve made more positive difference doing that than any other way. I even have semi-legal aliases to keep me hidden from my real role: false I.D., even a means to get money to me so it APPEARS I don’t have a bank account!

With markedly less trouble than I would have thought, I got hired on as an illegal alien at the hotel we were thinking of buying! Such excitement! I knew this indulgence was no good for me, but I had my gleeful guilty fun, cleaning the hotel rooms and commiserating with my ‘fellow’ hotel housekeepers! The building itself was in ace-shape, and the housekeepers I worked with were fine—they were, as a group, even politer and shyer than I am used to; and while housekeepers aren’t particularly known for being...svelte...I didn’t see a single one who was not markedly plump! I was by far the slimmest maid there...

After a week, with everything looking excellent, I called my superiors at corporate headquarters, advising the board to buy the hotel, and then telling them I would begin my semi-‘enforced’, but still very welcome, vacation-sabbatical for three months!

It was when I finished my phone call, when I saw red flashing lights behind me, and a voice telling me to “pull over”! The officer’s excuse for pulling me over was “driving while on the cellphone”, but that’s just what it was: an excuse. The officer, taking his cue from the octogenarian former Sheriff of the County who at that point was trying to get his job back, threw the book at me! What should have been a routine traffic stop became—as far as HE was concerned, and with zero provocation on my part—assaulting an arresting officer! His word against mine! As any scandal would break off all negotiations with the other hotel chain, I bit my tongue—hard—thinking that all of this could be cleared up easily, until I found out how many ADDITIONAL charges were being trumped up against me! By the time I found myself BEHIND BARS, it was too late!

I was found guilty of assaulting the police officer! The public defender assigned to me didn’t lift a fingernail to help me, let alone a finger! I was also found, in the “learned opinion of the arresting officer”, to be showing signs of “hostile schizophrenia” (his words) and “clinical depression”! Kept in a STRAITJACKET for three days, and in a bare cell for a four more, I was forced to take antidepression medication! I found later significant large amounts of money exchange hands when prisoners are kept medicated “for their own good”! After a week, I found that the cheap, generic antidepressants they forced me to take cause WEIGHT-GAIN!! After a month in jail with nothing to do except eat cheap food and take medication, I was put on work-release—to a sister hotel to the one my company bought! If only they had put me to work at the other one, I could be seen by our people—and SAVED!

My real I.D. I put in an airport locker. I have been a work-release prisoner for six months now. I crave the otherwise tedious work of cleaning hotel rooms because that’s far better than sitting in a bare cell, eating junk food and begging for the newspaper when the officer is done with it. When my personal effects get returned to me, I can only HOPE that the key to the airport locker is still there...

Privatizing Community Service

Our country is unfair to famous people!

Really, it is! We live in a world where the average person (“average” HA!) with no fame, no renown, and no ACHIEVEMENTS target the exceptional people online with Vigilante Cancel Culture!!

Maybe paying a prestigeous university $175,000 to “lubricate the skids” so that a completely worthy student could get in (my daughter) was skirting the law just a tad...it wasn’t like I was cutting in line to get a COVID vaccine early or anything really awful like THAT. They should have punished those REAL criminals, instead of honest and respectable people like me who only wanted the BEST for their daughters, right?!

Well, after some good-for-nothing busybody hacked my emails and leaked that to the authorities, I had to serve a three month sentence in PRISON! How unFAIR!! Because of COVID-19 I had to spend 22 hours out of every day in solitary confinement, and the other two hours were spent scrubbing toilets!! Because I was in for three months I even missed Mother’s Day!

But a policy I supported publicly—mandatory community service for the convicted turned over to private companies—was used against ME! This was meant for criminal types who were otherwise useless to society—not upstanding citizens like myself!

My “community service” is working for a maid’s service! “Cheery Maids” is making money off of my labor for what should have been two weeks, but has been extended three times to FOUR MONTHS!!! The company keeps on extending my community service part of my sentence for the stupidest and most UNFAIR violations—which are hardly violations at all! Oh, sure: if you’re a shiftless good-for-nothing who can’t keep off the streets with a Good Honest Job, those are really fair violations—they were NEVER meant to be used against someone like ME!!

The kitchen you see me cleaning in this photo is the best kitchen I’ve had to clean! All the rest have been worse! MUCH worse! It’s just SO UNFAIR that I have to clean the houses of people who don’t even make a third of what I do!!! Just once I had to clean a house where the people knew who I am, and the comments about me I could hear from the other rooms were just SO UPPITY! Really, that family was insufferable!!

I don’t know how much more my service sentence is going to be extended! I’ve heard rumors that Cheery Maids will extend my sentence until I show “Proper Contrition!” What do they call Proper Contrition? When I finally become expert at housecleaning by THEIR standards!! I only hope those Vigilante Cancel Culture Vultures don’t leak to the press just what I’m doing!!

Just yesterday I overheard talk between a fellow Community Service Prisoner and a junior manager at Cheery Maids. What I heard chilled my blood cold! She said she had served her term of community service and the manager even admitted she kept her nose clean and worked hard—and THAT was the issue: she was so good a worker now, that she was too valuable an asset to Cheery Maids—so they exercised their option to KEEP HER ON. What she used to do for work was no more, because she was now a mandated employee of Cheery Maids FROM NOW ON!!!

If you don’t do the work well enough, they extend your sentence! If you DO do the work well enough, you are a housekeeping maid for life!! This just can’t happen to me! Have an important life to live, not mop floors and scrub ovens!!!!

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