People celebrated the end of one year and start of a new year in different ways. They might drink champagne one night and swear off alcohol the next morning. Mary preferred to watch casino implosions on YouTube. She was from Las Vegas, where a new start usually meant blowing up a casino and starting fresh with a new one. Not that Mary planned on ( Read more... )

Someone (probably Gunther) had replaced the fruit in the strategically-placed fruit bowl with fun-size candy bars. Mary helped herself to a few pieces as she went through her tasks, but the bowl never got empty. In fact, the amount of candy seemed to double if she wasn't looking. After leaving the lobby for a few minutes, she returned to find that ( Read more... )

It was possible that Mary had gone a little overboard while stocking up at the party store. The hotel lobby was filled to the brim with balloons and paper streamers. The bell boy was tripping over balloons as he wrestled with luggage and Gunther was frowning as he pulled streamers out of the fruit bowl. But Mary, having learned her decorating style ( Read more... )

Mary had been sad to miss the picnic on Monday, but her player had worked a double shift she had gone into cleaning mode over the weekend. Once she got started, she didn't stop until she had cleaned ALL the things. And the hotel was full of things that needed to be cleaned. But now she was relaxing behind the front desk, which was currently covered ( Read more... )

Having worked in Las Vegas, there were a lot of things that Mary had seen that she wished she could un-see. The hotel rooms that were destroyed after epicly bad bachelor parties, the brothers who passed out in the lounge after playing craps for 96 hours straight, the time Danny and Delinda snuck out during a mandatory workplace harassment seminar ( Read more... )

Just because it was Independence Day didn't mean that Mary could take the day off. There she was at the front desk, filing out the paperwork related to the idiots on the seventh floor who managed to break their bathroom plumbing at 3 AM doing who-knows-what and subsequently flooding their room, the room below them, and part of the fifth floor ( Read more... )

Mary grew up in Las Vegas. She got her start working in Las Vegas mega-resorts, and she knew that after spending several years in Fandom, she would probably not recognize the Las Vegas skyline anymore. The city's hotels and casinos were constantly being torn down and rebuilt with new names and new marketing gimmicks. She'd quit her job at the ( Read more... )

It was quiet day at the hotel. Maybe a little too quiet, as far as Mary was concerned. So she was moving around the lobby, peeking behind the couches, checking under the coffee tables, and even carefully opening the janitorial closet to make sure nothing was lurking inside. Finding nothing, she continued to poke through all the drawers at the front ( Read more... )

There were two major differences from last week. One, Mary was sitting with at the front desk with a bemused expression on her face. Two, she was surrounded by jars of chocolate hazelnut spread. There were lined up along the end of the counter and piled up one on top of the other next to the guest register. She even found a few jars tucked into the ( Read more... )

Mary was sitting at the front desk, a jar of peanut butter in one hand, a spoon in the other. She sat there, eating spoonfuls of peanut butter and glaring at Gunther every time he walked past the front desk. She didn't say a word. When her spoon started scraping the bottom of the jar, Mary frowned and slammed the jar on the desk. That was Gunther's ( Read more... )