Grifters

Some years ago I was a housekeeping supervisor for the Sun Valley Company in Idaho. One day at work, I was in the house keeping office and I got a call from the front desk that a room was requesting extra towels.

We managed several condo complexes as well as two hotels and so most of the time I would call or page the supervisor in the area of the request and they would take care of it. In this case, the room was right around the corner from me and I always kept a few supplies with me in the office, so that I wouldn't need to find a maid's closet on the way to a delivery. So, I decided to grab the towels right next to me and hustle down to the room myself.

It couldn't have taken me more than one minute to get to the room from when I took the call from the front desk. I knocked on the door, "Housekeeping!, I'm here with your towels!". No answer. This was weird, but not too weird: I had found that customers often make a request at the front desk or just before leaving--possibly to avoid the need for a tip...but these guys had supposedly called the front desk and I got to their room very quickly plus, I didn't pass anybody on the way there and the way I came in was the only way out.

Our standard protocol when faced with a request and no customer is answering, is to key in, drop-off the goods and go. So I keyed my way in, put four bath towels on the foot of the bed and then immediately noticed an odd thing: There was a pile of cash on top of the TV. My instant thought was that these guests were trying to set up the poor shmoe who brought their towels. In retrospect I should have called security and had them take a gander at the room and then wait to see what shook-out of the situation. I left the towels--and the money and the room.

Sure enough, security called me a few minutes later and wanted to know who had been in the room: I involuntarily laughed and explained the situation to the security guy, who I knew pretty well and that was that. I think the company still comped the room, but everybody knew that the customers were scam artists. It was just lucky that I, a trusted supervisor, had gone to the room: A new guy would probably have been fired on general principles, or would have taken the bait and actually deserved to be fired.

A similar thing happened just a few days ago in Washington DC. I'll give you Mark Steyn's version from The Corner:

On March 20th, something truly extraordinary happened. On the eve of the health care vote, a group of black Democrat Congressmen (eschewing the private tunnels they usually use to cross from their offices to the Capitol) chose to walk en masse through a crowd of protesters, confident that the knuckledragging Tea Party goons they and their media pals have reviled for a year now would respond with racial epithets.

And then, when the crowd didn't, the black Congressmen made it up anyway. Representative Andre Carson (Democrat, Indiana) insisted he heard the N-word 15 times. He's either suffering from the same condition as that Guam-flipper from Georgia, or he's a liar. At a scene packed not only with crews from the Dem poodle media but with a gazillion cellphone cameras, not one single N-word has been caught on audio.

Grifters. All of them!