In addition to teaching qualities like personal grooming, polite etiquette, and bookkeeping, a front desk clerk is also trained for another demanding job: dealing with rude customers. Handling customer complaints can be difficult. While sometimes these complaints are trivial, other times they can make front desk staff cry with embarrassment. In June 2021, a Reddit user shared a post in the r/MaliciousCompliance group describing an incident involving a customer who behaved in an extremely overbearing manner. The guest claimed to have stayed on a floor of the hotel that didn’t exist and demanded to be taken there.

“The customer had a reservation for the 4th floor of a 3-story hotel, so I took her to the roof,” the hotel employee wrote in the caption of the now-deleted Reddit post, according to Bored Panda. Below the caption, they revealed the full story. At the time, the author of the post worked as a receptionist at a hotel. The hotel had three floors and was formerly called “Days Inn.” They revealed that one could only make a reservation by speaking to the front desk staff. “No online reservations; no third-party reservations. About 50% of our rooms were sold to walk-ins,” they wrote.

One weekend, the hotel was completely booked. An elevator was having problems, so the staff turned it off and called a repair service. It was 10 p.m. and the receptionist wasn’t expecting anyone until the next morning. That evening, all the expected guests had already checked in and the accessible rooms were on the same floor as the lobby, so the receptionist was relaxed and thought that if a guest needed help with their luggage, she would help them manually.

Then a woman suddenly walked into the hotel. “I don’t know her from checking in. She puts a piece of paper in front of me and then goes and grabs a bunch of luggage,” the Reddit user recalls. The piece of paper listed the woman’s reservation at the Days Inn at her address for the same night at one-tenth the price they were selling their rooms for before they were sold out. The employee told the woman, “I’m sorry to inform you that we do not accept third-party reservations and are unfortunately already sold out for that night,” but the woman demanded that her reservation be honored: “I have a reservation. It’s right there. I paid good money for it.”

“I believe you, ma’am, but unfortunately you are not in our system because we do not accept reservations from third parties. They sold it to you fraudulently,” said the employee. Instead of showing understanding, the woman became aggressive and shouted: “You just want to steal my money! I have a confirmation number here. I gave it to you!”

The employee tried to explain that although the hotel was listed as a “Days Inn” on the reservation slip, the hotel name had long since been changed, and pointed to a nearby sign. She also said that the reservation slip mentioned a reservation for a “room on the fourth floor” even though the hotel building only had three floors. But then the woman said something shocking: “I stayed at that Days Inn on the fourth floor last year!”

As the argument continued, the employee remained calm and responded politely, but then the woman screamed, almost demanding that she be taken to the fourth floor immediately. “I don’t react, I just stare at her with a blank face until she bangs on the desk and screams ‘Now!'” Fed up with the rude behavior, the employees took their huge bunch of keys, loaded themselves with the woman’s luggage and began to climb the stairs together.

When they reached the third floor, the employee cleverly pointed the woman to a sign with the floor number. They then used a maintenance key to unlock a door to the maintenance stairwell, where there were no lights. The woman trudged after the employee without saying anything. The receptionist opened the door to the tarred roof of the hotel and walked out. She gave the perfect response: “And here is the fourth floor. I hope it’s as nice as the last time you were here.” They then dropped the woman’s luggage and ran down the stairs to the reception.

Concluding the post, the Reddit user explained that if the woman had been a little more polite, they would have helped her get a room at another hotel. However, due to her rude behavior, they simply left her luggage on the roof without caring what happened to her. When the employee went back upstairs for a midnight round, the woman was no longer there. So they locked the door and assumed she must have left the hotel through a different exit.

The post received 10,000 upvotes and hundreds of comments. u/johnstern42 commented, “This is GOLD!” Other Reddit users, however, thought it was an episode of “Fawlty Towers,” referring to the fictional hotel in the British sitcom. People showered the receptionist with support, saying she did the best she could. u/a-rovinlgo praised her, saying, “Bravo! I could never have handled this situation without completely losing my cool – my hat’s off to you.”

Others sympathized with the woman who was duped by a third-party seller. Regarding third-party hotel reservations, u/eboom011 said, “This is exactly why I don’t book on third-party sites. I might look at their website to see what options there are in the area and filter for different amenities, but once I’ve made my choice, I always go to the hotel’s website or call directly to book. This sucked for everyone involved.”