My hometown is a small, rural community in southern missouri. Lots of bored kids, and lots of meth abound in such places. My first hotel job was working the front desk at the cheapest motel in town... and I mean the cheapest... Picture the rattiest, most sketchy-looking motel you've ever seen, and you probably won't be far off from this place. If life were a game of monopoly, this is the hotel you'd put on baltic avenue. On my first day on the job I witnessed a drug transaction in our little laundry room, and that pretty much set the tone for the whole year I would work there.
Now here's the craziest thing I ever saw: One day, a man and his girlfriend checked in at the start of my shift. Both reeked of alcohol, and likely had a cocktail of chemicals in their bodies I can only guess at. The man's speech was slurred, and his eyes were dilated. Still, I didn't judge, that was pretty par for the course for our clientele. I checked them in and for a few hours nothing eventful happened. That night, the girlfriend decided she wanted to buy something from our vending machine, and stepped out of her room. The vending machine was part of the front desk area, so I was treated to the sight of a woman, baked out of her mind, spending almost an hour staring at our selection of junk food, awkwardly fumbling with her change, trying, failing, trying, and finally succeeding to get the change into the payment slot, and then stumbling back out of the office.
Amusing as that was, that's not where the tale ended... see, apparently, over the course of her adventures with our vending machine, she had apparently forgotten, not only what room she was in, but even the general vicinity of the property where the room she had come from was located. Rather than come back to the office to ask me about it, she decided the best course of action was to knock on every door in order, and see if she recognized the person who answered... one of the people she bothered this way called the front desk about this, and I came out to usher her back to her proper room, thinking all was well again.
Ah, but there was one more chapter to this poorly acted farce! About an hour and a half after the girlfriend got settled, I received another call from a disturbed guest, this time they were reporting a man who was apparently dead in our parking lot. Alarmed, I went out to find the boyfriend. He was laying prone on the asphalt next to his car, his skin pale as death and his body perfectly still. Sincerely believing I was looking at a corpse, I started to dial 911 as I looked over the scene. I started to give the operator details of what was going on as I leaned down to check the boyfriend for a pulse. The second my fingers touched his skin, his eyes darted open so suddenly I dropped my phone in shock.
Apparently he and his girlfriend had a fight after she returned to his room, and he decided he would sleep in his car rather than deal with her... but either passed out or decided opening the car door was too much effort, and thus wound up sleeping right there in the lot. I was just relieved he was alive, and asked the operator to go ahead and send an ambulance, since he was clearly pretty messed up by whatever he'd been doing that night. the police and ambulance arrived, and I washed my hands of the whole issue.
It was the most eventful and surreal night of my life.